Empowering Data-Driven Resilience in African Cities

It's always exciting when two human-centred programmes come together to lay the groundwork for impactful action based on a shared vision. Thanks to a serendipitous meeting of minds, the Sahel and West Africa Club (OECD/SWAC) and Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) have now teamed up to provide data-driven insights to inform high-level decision making and ultimately drive positive change for African communities.

It all started when Brilé Anderson, Lead for Climate, Urbanisation, and Environment at OECD/SWAC, and Mpho Sadiki, Earth Observation Data Scientist at Digital EA Africa, connected while presenting on the same panel. Sadiki came to discuss the important role that accessible, demand-driven and analytically-ready data plays in informing empirical decision-making across Africa, while Anderson was there to share how OECD/SWAC’s latest work, combining green spaces with spatial urbanisation data, can help decision makers to support resilient and sustainable urbanisation.

With Africa’s urban population set to double by 2050 from 2015, monitoring and evaluating the evolution of green spaces, both within and around African cities, is vital. Green spaces provide important ecosystem benefits to cities, from regulating floods to reducing heat, but as cities grow, demand for land will increase, putting pressure on these spaces.

Monitoring green spaces, however, does come with challenges including limited access to data, technical know-how to use existing data, and the computational capacity required to process large volumes of raw data. 

To help address these challenges, OECD/SWAC have developed ready-to-use indicators to calculate the availability of green spaces by combining urban boundaries (as defined by Africapolis) with ESA World Cover database. Yet, one obstacle for OECD/SWAC was how to make the methodology widely available and build capacity with local actors.  

This is where DE Africa comes in. As an open-source platform and freely accessible sandbox, DE Africa makes it possible for users to run code on vast datasets. Together, DE Africa and OECD/SWAC have launched three interactive notebooks that allow users to analyse green spaces in African urban areas. These notebooks not only replicate existing analyses but also empower users to run their own code and explore the data firsthand:

• Africapolis green space indicators: A general dataset describing green spaces across urban areas available on DE Africa’s data explorer, along with the underlying raw data: https://lnkd.in/ebG_zjux
• Green space availability methodology: A step-by-step guide using the ESA World Cover database and Africapolis urban agglomerations, enabling anyone to rerun the code to track green spaces and tree coverage in their cities, with the flexibility to adjust boundaries or underlying data to suit their projects and needs: https://lnkd.in/e5TVUyF9
• Urban tree cover analysis with Sentinel-2: A method to assess tree cover in cities, using Sentinel-2 data and Africapolis urban agglomerations or customisable boundaries. https://lnkd.in/eedJbZKh

The collaboration between OECD/SWAC and DE Africa holds the potential to help African countries better understand urban heat islands, identify areas for green space development, and even pinpoint flood-prone areas in densely populated regions. These insights can inform better urban planning, helping governments pre-empt challenges such as overpopulation and unsuitable settlement areas.

Brilé Anderson affirms that "this partnership has the potential to spark meaningful discussions and broaden our collective impact. Ultimately, we aim to provide key data—such as the number of extreme heat days across Africa—to support anticipatory decisions and risk mitigation strategies”.

Her colleague, Jorge Patiño, Geographer and Policy Analyst at OECD/SWAC, emphasises that DE Africa adds substantial value to the green space data already available. "We can direct local governments and institutions to the DE Africa Sandbox environment, where they can tailor data for their specific needs. This localised approach is vital for effective urban planning."

Stay tuned as we continue this collaboration, developing new codebooks for measuring proximity to trees and creating modules to help users get the most out of these tools! 

OECD/SWAC fosters strategic dialogue among its Members to anticipate regional transformations and their territorial impacts. By producing high-quality maps, data and in-depth analyses, OECD/SWAC provides valuable insights that inform decision making by taking both a retrospective and a forward-looking approach to promote regional integration, sustainable development and long-term stability. Bringing together key regional actors including UEMOA, CILSS and ECOWAS—alongside development partners and governments, SWAC serves as a unique platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing across West Africa.

Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) leverages Earth observation (EO) data to support sustainable development across the continent. The platform provides routine, reliable services to help policymakers, scientists, and industries tackle challenges such as climate change, water management, agriculture, land degradation and urbanisation. Through open-access, decision-ready products, DE Africa empowers users to monitor environmental and social changes and make informed decisions that promote good governance and resource management.