Sentinel Asia
The Sentinel Asia initiative is an international collaboration among space agencies, disaster management agencies, and international agencies for applying remote sensing and Web-GIS technologies to support disaster management in the Asia-Pacific region.
Description
Asian disaster statistics indicate that the Asia-Pacific region suffers disproportionately from natural disasters. Over the last 30 years, the region has been impacted by some 37% of disasters recorded worldwide, and accounts for 57% of global fatalities and 89% of the total victims associated with such disasters. Given this scenario, our goal is to showcase earth observation technologies as key tools for disaster risk management in the Asia-Pacific region.
Specifically, Sentinel Asia aims to:
- Improve safety in society through the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) combined with space technologies;
- Improve the speed and accuracy of disaster preparedness and early warning;
- Improved disaster assessment and understanding of their impact and physical extent;
- Minimize the number of victims and social/economic losses resulting from disasters;
- Contribute to the establishment of rehabilitation plans.
Many of these goals are possible only through the wide-area and fast response collection of images and other data which can be acquired by Earth observing satellites.
Did the Sendai Framework change or contribute to changes in your activities/organization? If so, how?
The Sendai Framework provides a roadmap to reduce disaster risk by 2030. It calls for the promotion of real time access to reliable data, make use of space and in situ information, including geographic information systems (GIS), and use information and communications technology innovations to enhance measurement tools and the collection, analysis and dissemination of data. The work of Sentinel Asia is aligned with this and other aspects of the Sendai Framework.
What led you to make this commitment/initiative?
What was your position before making this Voluntary Commitment / prior to the Sendai Framework?
We are motivated by the benefits from rapid technological advances and how data has been delivered more quickly via the internet as easy-to-interpret disaster-related information. Sentinel Asia is not designed to replace already active efforts by many of our regional agencies in delivery of information to emergency services. Rather, it aims to expand such efforts and make such data available to all countries and many more people in the region, particularly in countries that do now their own satellite reception facilities. Through such a backbone, information about disasters could begin to be delivered more efficiently through the ’world-wide-web’, even outside national borders, in ’real-time’ or ’near real-time’, and used as early-warning, or as post-disaster information by various countries and relevant end-user agencies.
