Organisers: European Space Agency; European Commission (Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs)
Venue: EU Pavilion, COP22, Marrakesch
Date: Thursday 10 November 2016

This side event was organized by the European Space Agency to raises awareness of the European Copernicus Programme with its new fleet of satellites – the Sentinels – and their use for REDD+. It aimed to share experiences from several EC and ESA pilot projects demonstrating the use of Earth Observation in MRV systems to implement REDD+, serving needs of developing countries and addresses future European support to national implementations. In this context, Dr. Thomas Haeusler the project Co-ordinator for the H2020 Project “Earth Observation Services for Monitoring Dynamic Forest Disturbances to the Users-EOMonDis” presented the overall objectives and activities of the project. He outlined initially the technical challenges of using satellite data mapping tropical dry and humid forests and the potential for the Sentinel 2 data to address some of the challenges. Especially in the context of the dry forest mapping the use of dense time series which the Sentinel 2 data offers can be used to overcome challenges posed by seasonal changes of tree cover, phenology as well as the sparse overall tree cover. EOMonDis will contribute to the development of operation near real time monitoring of forest disturbances which was noted to be critical for the national REDD+ Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems for developing countries.

The presentation was well received and Dr. Haeusler joined the Plenary Session to reply to questions posed by the audience.