River Satellite Imagery
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Technology
U.S. Satellite Imagery from NASA is Expected to Soon Begin Helping Milions of People Living in the Lower Mekong River Basin of Southeast Asia to Deal with Natural Disasters and the Challenges of Climate Change
The project adds to NASA's existing programs that already help communities in South America, Africa and South Asia.
The five-year U.S.-led project brings together the Lower Mekong nations of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, as the region faces growing challenges from the impact of climate change, in particular increasingly severe weather patterns.
Environmentalists say these challenges include issues over water use, deforestation, floods and disaster mitigation.
The United Nations' Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, UNISDR, says costs are rising from natural disasters and that from 2000 to 2012 the world's damage bill from climate related disasters stood at $1.7 billion, claiming 1.2 million lives and affecting 2.9 billion people.
In a bid to improve information for communities at risk, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), backed by the U.S. development agency, USAID, is to work with local partners, including Thailand-based Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, or ADPC, to provide satellite imagery to the region's governments.
ADPC project officer, Gabrielle Iglesias, says the project aims to provide information about changing conditions to communities and help them use it effectively.
"This project will be addressing both those steps -- the development of the tools to process the information, the satellite obtained data and then to raise the capacity for decision makers to understand and interpret the results of this analysis for use in their own decision making over land use, environmental protection, adaptation," she said.
Senior USAID officials say the data will be passed on to scientists, government representatives, national resource managers and disaster response specialists. In a statement to VOA, officials said the aim was to more effectively target support to the most urgent areas after natural disasters.
The costs of obtaining such satellite imagery have sharply declined in recent years, making the information more accessible. Such data is valuable especially in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters. In 2008 Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy delta region of Myanmar, also known as Burma, claiming more than 130,000 lives.
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