Airbus Flood and Drought Resilience: Earth Observation-enabled decision support for flood and drought resilience in Ethiopia and Kenya Both Ethiopia and Kenya are flood and drought
prone with significant mortality and economic losses
frequently attributed to such events in each country.
This project focuses on building resilience to these
events in order to lessen risk and support economic
resilience.
In Ethiopia work is focused on developing an
improved understanding of flood and drought
hazards and risks to help build social and economic
resilience to water-related problems. In Kenya the
focus is on the effectiveness of using EO data for the
micro-insurance market and Government Institutions;
an important tool for farmers who currently have
little or no access to detailed information. This will
be supported by the improved delivery of tailored
information to assist decision-making related to flood
and drought at the following geographical levels:
• Ethiopia: at river basin level (working with the
Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation).
• Kenya: at local level (working with women farmer
intermediaries and micro-insurance actors) and
at county and sub-county level (working with the
National Drought Management Authority).
Information will include:
• Ethiopia: assessments of risks and socio-economic
damage due to flood and drought provided to
the Climate Resilience Green Economy secretariat.
Information will be in the form of reports, maps,
statistics, probability of occurrence, model outputs,
etc. This will allow authorities to improve planning
for both food shortages and adaptation measures
for climate change.
• Kenya: historical and current information on
drought and flood occurrences. In particular,
the actual information will inform a continuous
monitoring process for crop status on a 10-day
and 20-metre basis.
This will support the following scenarios:
• micro-insurance providers making decisions on
farmer compensation.
• governmental authorities improving management
of flood disasters and periods of food shortages,
and, addressing government subsidies.
• farmer communities making decisions on selling/
buying pastoral goods on the market during crisis
periods.
Capacity building in both Ethiopia and Kenya will take
place with the end-users of the online dashboard. The project aims to save lives and improve livelihoods in Ethiopia and Kenya through the development of a single dashboard tool that informs longer term planning and investment in Ethiopia and shorter term flood forecasting in Ethiopia and drought financing in Kenya. The dashboard tool will include satellite data on elevation, rainfall, and unprocessed indicators of land use and conditions taken from Sentinel 2 and UK DMC 2 / Kaz ST Sat.