From 29 July to 2 August 2012, UN-SPIDER conducted a Technical Advisory Mission to Cape Verde supported by the generous contributions of the Government of Austria. Upon the invitation of the Serviço Nacional de Protecção Civil (SNPC) a diverse and outstanding mission team of 12 experts from the disaster management and space technology community, academia as well as crowdsourcing experts visited Cape Verde. The mission included meetings with key disaster management authorities in the Government, UN agencies, regional and international organizations/initiatives and private entrepreneurs to discuss the topic in depth and make recommendations and develop guidelines to improve the use of space-based information in disaster management and emergency response.
During a high-level debriefing the following points were discussed with representatives of the government and the United Nations Development Programe (UNDP): 1) The need to strengthen the National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, specifically with regard to the incorporation of space-based technologies; 2) The need to ensure the sharing of geospatial information, and; 3) The need to ensure access and use of space-based information in the development of a vulnerability map. In this context UN-SPIDER will initially be helping by identifying available imagery for the Ilha do Fogo.
The mission team discussed other needs as well including strengthening the link to existing mechanisms that make available satellite information to support emergency response, the need to ensure a more central role of the national civil protection agency, the need to increase awareness of the potential of geospatial technology and space-based information, the need to enhance data sharing between the various institutions, and finally the need to identify capacity building opportunities.
These and other mission outputs together with all the recommendations identified will be included in the Mission Report and forwarded to the Government of Cape Verde. The international mission team of 12 experts agreed to work closely with the Government of Cape Verde and the Serviço Nacional de Protecção Civil (SNPC) to ensure that the mission will lead to concrete follow-up actions.
