Africa first continent with digital land use data

Africa became the first continent in the world to complete the collection of accurate and harmonised digital land use and land use change data.

Africa first continent with digital land use data

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• The story: Africa became the first continent in the world to complete the collection of accurate, comprehensive and harmonised digital land use and land use change data under the Africa Open DEAL initiative. DEAL stands for Data for the Environment, Agriculture and Land Initiative. The data collection and analysis initiative is led by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the African Union Commission (AUC).
• Learning: This open data initiative that covered the period between 2018 and 2020, disclosed more forests and arable lands than were previously detected.

1. 7 billion more trees - There are around seven billion trees outside forests in Africa, the continent-wide survey revealed. It also disclosed more arable lands in Africa than before.
2. Collect Earth, a free and open source software developed by FAO, was used to collect data through Google Earth. It is part of the set of tools called Open Foris and was developed in 2017 in collaboration with Google Earth, Bing Maps and Google Earth Engine.
3. The survey covered 100 parameters on each sampling point of about 0.5 hectares and included tree counts, farmlands, wildfires and existing infrastructure.
4. The data was analysed to highlight land use change over the past 20 years and the potential for restoration at the national level for every country in the African continent.

• Power of science: This initiative showed that science and innovation could provide real solutions and that collaboration and pooling experience led to the best results. The initiative revealed that 350 million hectares of cropland are cultivated in Africa. This is an increase by 25 per cent over the crop land in the continent. In 2018, 279 million hectares of crop land was cultivated in the continent, FAO estimates show.
• Fight against hunger: FAO said that the information received from the Africa Open Deal could help in the fight against hunger in the continent.
• Knowledge centre:

1. Africa - The world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, Africa, has an area of 30.3 million km2 and covers 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20% of its land area. Its population is approximately 130 crore (2018), or 16% of the world's human population. With a median age in 2012 of just 19.7 years, Africa's population is the youngest amongst all the continents. Due to a history of sustained exploitation and colonisation, Africa is the least wealthy continent per capita. Sadly, even now, most countries have not been able to develop viable democracies.
2. African agriculture - Agriculture is the most important economic activity in Africa, providing employment for about two-thirds of the continent’s working population. For most African countries, it makes up an average of 30 to 60 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) and about 30 percent of the value of exports. But arable land and land under permanent crops occupy only about 6 percent of Africa’s total land area. Agriculture has been largely confined to subsistence farming and dependent on the inefficient system of shifting cultivation, in which land is temporarily cultivated with simple implements until its fertility decreases and then abandoned for a time to allow the soil to regenerate. The persistence of relatively low-productivity agricultural systems is also due to a lack of integration between crop production and animal husbandry. Traditionally, sedentary cultivators live apart from their nomadic herdsmen neighbours.

 

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