Africa Knowledge Platform news

This issue of the African Knowledge Platform (AKP) newsletter shines a spotlight on biodiversity.

The 4^th Pillar of the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 calls for an ambitious global biodiversity agenda. This Strategy aims to deploy EU external actions to improve governance, trade policy, resource mobilisation, and international cooperation. For example, the EU doubled its external funding for biodiversity for 2021-2027 to €7 billion.

At the centre of these efforts in Africa is NaturAfrica, an initiative to protect wildlife and key ecosystems while offering development opportunities in green sectors for local populations (e.g., nature-based businesses, non-timber forest products, sustainable rangeland management and agro-pastoral value chains).

To succeed, initiatives like NaturAfrica must integrate science and policy across various themes, not just ecology. The European Commission offers products dedicated to biodiversity, such as the Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity, DOPA (Digital Observatory for Protected Areas), and BIOPAMA (Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management Programme). The AKP complements these specialist portals by providing a unique single-entry point for diverse data, tailored to the African context, needed by a modern multidisciplinary initiative like NaturAfrica. In addition to geographic data on protected areas, habitats, and priority landscapes, the AKP also serves data on human settlements, livestock densities, and opportunities for viewing large game species.

The multidisciplinary character of NaturAfrica embodies larger global trends around biodiversity. As the global community comes together this week at COP 15 in Montreal to finalise the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, they will expand their ambition beyond plants and animals. The EU is central to these international negotiations with the aim of raising the level of ambitions globally, particularly in Africa.

Although the draft Framework’s 2030 Action Targets cover traditional conservation issues – like protected areas, ecological restoration, sustainable harvesting and eradicating invasive species – they also encompass themes beyond the natural environment. This includes the integration of biodiversity into development processes and poverty reduction in the public and private sectors (Target 14) and a shift towards full sustainability of extraction and production practices (Target 15).

This newsletter draw attention to how the Africa Knowledge Platform can support the European Commission’s efforts around biodiversity. This includes participating in important events in the annual biodiversity calendar, tailoring biodiversity information for the African context, and summarising some of the latest scientific research from the Joint Research Centre.

The Africa Knowledge Platform Team attended the IUCN Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC) in Kigali, Rwanda, during July. This meeting was the first post-pandemic opportunity to meet with African partners, so participants made use of every moment. In addition to taking part in the congress – which resulted in the APAC Kigali Call for Action – JRC scientists stayed on after the meeting to deliver training on the Integrated Management Effectiveness Tool (IMET) at Akagera National Park, one of Rwanda’s best managed protected areas. IMET is a great example of how JRC have developed tools to provide evidence to support decision making around a policy priority in Africa – helping to understand what works in protected areas and how they can be supported to achieve biodiversity and socio-economic goals. IMET has now been implemented across several hundred protected areas in Africa.

Activities from the Africa Knowledge Platform, BIOPAMA and GMES and Africa were presented at the AARSE 2022 international conference organized by the African Association of Remote Sensing of the Environment and held in Kigali, Rwanda on the 24^th-28th October 2022. This offered an opportunity to engage with African and international communities to strengthen a partnership network that could help build the AKP in the future. The event also helped promote the use of Earth Observation data and services in Africa to respond to policy needs, build capacity, establish spatial data infrastructure and use standardised technologies and protocols. The GMES and Africa Program organised a side event together with the African Geomatics Professionals Network aiming at training 20 young African entrepreneurs on how to develop their businesses.

The Africa Knowledge Platform and BIOPAMA team attended the GEO Week 2022, held in Accra, Ghana from 31 October to 04 November. The event focused on the theme ‘Global Action for Local Impact’ and showcased how global collaboration is accelerating the use of Earth Observations to support actions around biodiversity loss, climate change, the ocean, nature-based solutions and food security. The GMES and Africa Programme Coordinator underlines the need for more synergies among EO programs in Africa and a critical mass of human capital.

The Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity includes a dedicated section on biodiversity financing listing EU actions, publications, resources, news and events. Mid-October at the European Business and Nature Summit, European businesses joined the European Commission and partner organisations advocating for an ambitious outcome of the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) to be held in Montreal in December 2022. They discussed how companies and financial institutions can contribute ‘in practice’ to achieving the objectives of the future Global Biodiversity Framework.

In the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, the EU and its Member States committed to implementing more than 100 actions by 2030. The EU Biodiversity Strategy Actions Tracker and the Indicator Dashboard are designed to track progress in the implementation of actions, including EU external actions and of its ambitious global biodiversity agenda. Last October, a webinar was organised by the JRC on connectivity and protection effectiveness, this is relevant to the Biodiversity Strategy Target 3 under pillar 1 on nature protection, and to pillar 4 on global biodiversity.

On the 16th November, a stakeholder workshop on Biodiversity and Earth Observation was organised by the Knowledge Centre for Earth Observation. As a follow-up of the panel discussions on policy needs and existing technologies and opportunities, a report on this biodiversity deep dive assessment will be published on the first quarter of 2023. It will include a case study on the use of Earth Observation in Zambia.

The sheer amount of cutting-edge biodiversity content on the Africa Knowledge Platform is truly too much to list here. A good starting point would be to use custom filters to find the information you need:

• Biodiversity content can be searched under the Natural Resources thematic topic.
• Alternatively, you filter content by SDG 14: Life below Water to see the latest information from ocean and marine ecosystems; or by SDG15: Life on Land for the latest on terrestrial systems.

Among the newest latest datasets added to the platform are species richness maps for threatened sharks and rays in Africa’s coastal regions (among a collection of species data from the IUCN from land and seas); carbon stocks in vegetation litter (among a suite of datasets on the carbon stocks from various sources); and high resolution habitat maps that align with the species’ habitat requirements from the IUCN Red List.

The platform also includes deep-dive stories that present geospatial data as accessible policy-relevant narratives. While biodiversity information is featured in several narrative, it is most prominent in the following stories:

• Nature: an economic asset – which makes the case for biodiversity-based economic development in Africa
• More than paper parks – which describes efforts to improve the effectiveness of marine protected areas, particularly in the Indian Ocean.
• Engaging communities in land planning – which showcases how geospatial data can support participatory landuse planning in a way that benefits biodiversity, climate and people.
• Life Cycle Thinking for our Food – which explores the global footprint of or food consumption through a case study on the impact of cocoa consumption on deforestation in west Africa.

The partners section of the Africa Knowledge Platform provides a curated list of institutions that have collaborated with the Joint Research Centre, including key partners on the BIOPAMA project.

Finally, the Africa Knowledge Platform hosts interactive tools on Key Biodiversity Areas, areas of global importance for the persistence of biodiversity; as well eConservation, a tool for tracking financial investments in biodiversity conservation.