African continent created by combining images from all months of 2005. Data from MODIS instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite. Image Courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory.
Last Friday the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Digital Earth Africa, released their report ‘Unlocking the potential of Earth Observation to address Africa’s critical challenges’.
The assessment in the report, which grabbed the headlines, was that the work of Digital Earth Africa in providing Earth Observation (EO) data could create an impact in excess of $2 billion a year to African industry – and this was a conservative assessment! For us though, our interest was really peaked by the three areas they’d used to quantify this figure:
- Development of African EO industry – $500 million.
- Boosting agriculture production – $900 million.
- Effective regulation of gold mining activity – $900 million.
In particular, we were drawn to the mining part of the report as although we are not involved in gold mining, we are doing a number of projects related to mining including leading the Earth Observation for Sustainable Aggregate Supply (EO4SAS) project in Kenya using EO data to support sustainable sand mining and it is surprising to see the similarities between the two different resources.
Surface gold mining starts by setting creating a number of artificial ponds to the allow the sedimentation of solids from the water, and the report highlights how satellite EO data can be used to detect the ponds to help the governments understand how much gold mining is occurring, alongside using land classification changes to detect associated activities such as land reclamation. Of course, as we aware, simply applying a machine-learning algorithm to satellite data is simply the start, as it is important to underpin this with ground truth data to ensure what you are highlighting as a potential mine really is a potential mine, and not another man-made or natural activity.
The World Economic Forum report highlights three benefits which can be achieved using satellite EO data to monitor gold mining. These are:
Increase Fiscal Revenues
A significant number of gold mines are illegal meaning that they often do not pay the local or national taxes, and that the working conditions for the miners are dangerous. Using Digital Earth Africa’s EO data and tools to identify gold mines will enable countries to know where the legal and regulated mines are, and where the illegal unregulated ones are. It is estimated if this could prevent just 10% of illegal mines it could generate savings of $900 million per year.
Safeguarding Environmental Resources
Illegal mining also causes environmental damage by not complying with regulations to safeguard the natural world. This can be from releasing chemicals and minerals in the groundwater table and air, to deforestation, river diversion and biodiversity loss. Across Africa it is estimated that illegal gold mining cause’s $1.4 billion damage to the environment, and so preventing just 10% of this loss would saving $140 million.
Improved Public Health
Following on from the damage to the environment is the knock-on impacts on human health with both air and water pollution, with the latter being the most common type. For example, the report notes that there is much higher incidence of malaria, fever and diarrhoea near illegal mines. Whilst limited data exists to quantify the impact on public health, preventing illegal mining will give health benefits to the local communities.
The report also highlights how satellite EO data can be used to support farming and agriculture, and whilst these will not be a surprise to another who is working in the industry, the four areas it notes are:
- Savings on water usage
- Increasing crop yields
- Reduced pesticide usage, and therefore reducing pesticide costs
- Reduction in insurance costs
Digital Earth Africa is the driving force behind the Africa Open Data Cube that provides freely available pre-processed analysis ready satellite EO data to help countries start to gain a better understanding of what is happening across Africa and enable actions to be taken based on that understanding which should help both save money and improve the lives of people across the continent.
The report is helpful in quantifying the potential for EO across Africa, and it was certainly an interesting to read for us in relation to our project. We spoke to Digital Earth Africa last year about how we might able to synergise our project with their work and it will be exciting to see how much further this will go in the coming year.
