UN-SPIDER’s Senior Programme Coordinator, Mr Luc St-Pierre, addressed the attending delegations of the 57th session of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) on 12 June 2014 in a technical presentation.
Mr St-Pierre presented recent UN-SPIDER activities in the areas of technical advisory support, such as missions to Bhutan, El Salvador, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Vietnam and Zambia, as well as training programmes delivered in Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Mozambique and Sudan. He also highlighted to the delegates that UN-SPIDER had become active in emergencies such as typhoon Bopha in Palau and the Philippines, typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, or floods in Iraq.
Mr St-Pierre stressed the importance of UN-SPIDER as a knowledge hub: “Knowledge management and dissemination of knowledge are also central elements of UN-SPIDER and a constant focus of our whole team.” UN-SPIDER’s Knowledge Portal www.un-spider.org is the main instrument of the programme’s knowledge management efforts.
Finally, he underlined UN-SPIDER's involvement in the development of the post-2015 development agenda and the development of a new global framework for disaster risk reduction, which will be discussed in Sendai, Japan in March 2015. It is UN-SPIDER's goal to promote the use of space-based information in the context of sustainable development and disaster risk reduction.
The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space was set up by the General Assembly in 1959 ( resolution 1472 (XIV) ) to review the scope of international cooperation in peaceful uses of outer space, to devise programmes in this field to be undertaken under United Nations auspices, to encourage continued research and the dissemination of information on outer space matters, and to study legal problems arising from the exploration of outer space. The Committee and its two Subcommittees meet annually to consider questions put before them by the General Assembly, reports submitted to them and issues raised by the Member States.
