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Agriculture is critical to the future of sustainable development. Globally the entire sector is being challenged to produce approximately 70% more food to feed 9 billion people by 2050. It has been acknowledged that most of this increase will need to come from greater land and water productivity as well as expansion of arable and irrigated areas. However, currently, agriculture consumes 70% of global freshwater, and emits about a quarter of all global greenhouse gases. Some of the current farming practices have negative consequences on water quality, and they impact biodiversity through land clearing and habitat fragmentation. Commodities production has been identified as one of the key causes of deforestation worldwide. Therefore the central question on the future of global sustainable development is how this vast increase in food and agriculture commodities supply can be achieved in a sustainable way.
Since 2008 the European Space Agency (ESA) has worked closely with Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and their Client States to harness the benefits of Earth Observation (EO) in global sustainable development. Earth Observation for Sustainable Development (EO4SD) is a new ESA initiative which aims at increasing the uptake of EO-based information in regular development operations at national and international level.
Results
After three successful years, the EO4SD Agriculture and Rural Development cluster provides an overview of the project results. From 2016–2019, the EO4SD consortium demonstrated how EO-based information and services can support agricultural monitoring and management tasks. The initiative also worked on the ground with stakeholder’s to build capacity for them to use satellite imagery in their projects.
The following document outlines how the consortium implemented these state-of-the-art EO-based services in the context of the EO4SD initiative of the European Space Agency.
Please feel free to get in touch with ESA Technical Officer: Anna Burzykowska - Anna.Burzykowska@esa.int or Project Lead: Remco Dost - Remco.Dost@eleaf.com if you would like further information about the EO4SD project and how you or your organisation can use EO-based services to your advantage.
Objectives
EO4SD - Agriculture and Rural Development Cluster project - aims at demonstrating the benefits of EO-based geo-information products and services to support agricultural monitoring and management tasks: MDBs programmes and projects that deal with land degradation, soil erosion, food security and irrigation systems management.
Specifically, the main objective of the project is to demonstrate that the effectiveness of the MDB’s technical assistance interventions and financial investments in agriculture sector can be measurably enhanced by using EO-derived information to support:;
- Large-scale crop area and type estimate (i.e. crop cover mapping and status assessment)
- Irrigation and irrigation systems management (i.e. energy balance, water productivity and water stress)
- Agriculture productivity assessment (i.e. yield estimation, ground water, precipitation monitoring)
- Rural infrastructure investments planning and monitoring (i.e. households and transport networks mapping)
- Land Degradation Assessment (i.e. land use, rainfall, soil moisture, precipitation, fAPAR, NDVI indicators)
- Ecosystem services assessment (i.e. water quality assessment, nitrogen content, land surface properties)
- Environmental Impact Assessment (i.e. landscape level classification and change mapping including fragmentation, and agriculture commodities production impact on deforestation)
Portfolio
The portfolio provides a list of the state-of-the-art EO-based information services available to support agricultural monitoring and management. Please refer to the complete portfolio brochure to learn more about the services, their technical specifications and the application areas.

Where we work
The EO4SD - Agriculture and Rural Development Cluster project aim is to develop and demonstrate the provision of customised agricultural information services to support the operations of the following MDBs and IFIs (international financing institutions): the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the World Bank Group (WBG), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The preliminary list of case studies includes countries or regions in different continents: North Africa (Morocco), Africa (the Great Green Wall Initiative region, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, and Uganda), Latin America (Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay), Asia (Cambodia) and Middle East (Syria).

Project Consortium
The project is implemented by a consortium of specialist service providers in the European Earth Observation sector. The consortium integrates EO technical proficiency and a wide experience in developing geospatial operation services in the agriculture and rural domain: eLEAF (The Netherlands) (lead), DHI Gras (Denmark), GeoVille (Austria), University of Twente - ITC (The Netherlands), Satelligence (The Netherlands), Lahmeyer International (Germany), Nelen & Schuurmans (The Netherlands) and SpaceTec Partners (Belgium).