The Power of Satellites— Closing the Digital Gap through International Cooperation
2020’s World Food Day theme, set by the Food & Agricultural Organisation, was “ Grow, Nourish, Sustain. Together, and invited reflection on the theme of sustainable international cooperation in global agriculture. International cooperation is a core value at the heart of the UK Space Agency and its International Partnership Programme, which funded the collaborative EO4cultivar project. This article reflects on the notion of cooperation and how it impacts problems related to water access and distribution in the Virú valley in northern Peru.
Governing Water
In 2018, the EO4cultivar consortium established links with a local water association in the Virú valley. The connection to the Junta de Riego was facilitated by ITP, a national Peruvian public private partnership that aims to support technology transfer. Since then, the EO4cultivar team at Environment Systems has mapped the user needs of a small water association in La Libertad, Perú.
Working together is a learning process. Luisa Carranza, coordinator at the Junta de Riego in the Virú valley puts it as follows: ‘We are a small non-profit and EO4cultivar is our only international cooperation project. The process requires adaptation but it is very useful for us because we will receive up-to-date information on our area of work’.
The Virú valley water association, a non-profit, deals with various challenges of a complex nature on a daily basis. The area under its administration is 15,000 hectares and includes >1000 smallholder farms. Problems include issues around distribution, insufficient availability of irrigation water, boundary disputes and unauthorised water canals.
These issues are complicated to resolve because problems around water distribution and ownership are first and foremost social issues. Without access to up-to-date information, however, the job that Luisa and her team have to deal with becomes even more difficult, if not impossible.
Accessing Satellite Data
In order to support the association’s capability to resolve these issues, the EO4cultivar project is creating a delivery mechanism to enable the water association to receive timely, regular up-to-date information derived from Earth Observation data.
Environment Systems will deliver high-resolution crop health monitoring data from the PlanetScope and Sentinel-2 satellites for a selection of areas, including areas prone to ground water salinisation. Together with the water association, Environment Systems is developing a delivery mechanism that allows the water association to use this data in their operations alongside existing data and management tools.
In order to ensure that the information received can be used and is available over the long-term, Environment Systems has created targeted Spanish-language training in a suitable GIS software package. In doing so, it has created a valuable, lasting resource that will be freely available following the project’s end date. This in turn helps to create an objective evidence-base that ultimately improves water management, delivers societal benefit and contributes to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals .
As the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN rightly recognised with its emphasis on the word ‘together’, in 2020’s world food day theme, bottom-up cooperation with grassroots organisations is essential if projects are to have lasting impact and if actors are to be as well-equipped as possible for addressing urgent environmental challenges, such as water shortages in food production.
EO4cultivar is an International Partnership Programme project funded by the UK Space Agency, which delivers satellite data solutions for agriculture. Image credit: Colour infrared Sentinel-2 and Planet imagery of the Viru Valley, Peru. Powered by Planet. Includes content sourced via SkyWatch Space Applications Inc. Environment Systems Data Services ©️ [2016–20], CC BY-SA 4.0.
Originally published at https://space.blog.gov.uk on October 16, 2020.
