ECLAT Lake Chad

Overview

The Lake Chad region was selected for ESA's Earth Observation for Sustainable Development project on the theme "Fragility, Conflict and Security” (FCS) as one of the four priority regions in the world for aid to fragile areas after consultation with bodies such as the World Bank and UNDP. Climate change is one of the main factors behind the fragility, conflict and endemic violence (e.g. the spreading influence of Boko Haram) encountered in the region. Extreme variations in temperature and rainfall, as well as the frequency of floods and droughts are expected to increase in the four countries bordering Lake Chad in the coming years. These events are seriously affecting food security, leading to population displacement and the growth in numbers of refugee camps, thus increasing the risk of conflicts and violence.

Using a multi-sensor satellite approach, the ECLAT project aims to assess the evolution of the basin according to 4 themes: monitoring of the natural environment, monitoring of land use and agricultural cover, the evolution of urban areas/refugee camps and the management of water resources and in particular of the lake. Selected themes will used to set up an operational early warning service.

An ECLAT implementation schedule is proposed for integration with the EO4SD project. This will allow for the inclusion of new stakeholders such as the UNDP in the group of existing stakeholders in 2021.

Figure 1. Dynamics of land use change around Lake Chad based on ESA Land Cover CCI data

Territories for experimentation

• Lake Chad area (involving 4 countries: Cameroun, Niger, Nigeria, Chad)

Results - Final products

• A spatial distribution indicator of the urban heat island phenomenon

Related Projects

Data

Satellite

• Sentinel 1, 2, 3, Landsat, Jason, Pleiades, WorldView and other open access high-resolution data on the region

Other

• The use of in-situ data available through open data sources and those that could be made available by users, will be maximized for the calibration and validation of the generated geospatial products.

  It should be noted that the associated EO4SD FCS project has a DataCube platform with current standards (web interface, Jupyter notebook, OpenAPI, etc.).