Advancing Disaster Preparedness and Response in Southern Africa
Pretoria, South Africa, 15–19 September 2025 – UN-SPIDER cooperated with the Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces (ZFL) of the University of Bonn, the South African National Space Agency (SANSA) and the International Disasters Charter, who co-organized a week-long training on the International Charter: Space and Major Disasters.
The training brought together more than 25 participants from Eswatini, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Botswana alongside disaster management and space professionals from South Africa. The event opened with introductory presentations by representatives from the European Space Agency (ESA), SANSA, ZFL and UN-SPIDER, providing an overview of their respective work, including the importance of the Charter’s mission and how it supports disaster response worldwide.
Learning About the International Charter and ESA Charter Mapper
In the following days, participants engaged in hands-on sessions to learn how to use the ESA Charter Mapper tool and simulate activations. This web-based platform allows Charter Project Managers (PMs) and Value Adders (VAs) to access large volumes of Earth observation (EO) data, perform visual and GIS analyses, and generate geo-information to support disaster management.
The International Charter: Space and Major Disasters facilitates the rapid acquisition and delivery of satellite EO data at no cost to support disaster management and humanitarian relief operations worldwide. To enhance this process, ESA has developed the Charter Operational System (COS-2) and the ESA Charter Mapper, which together enable PMs and VAs to work directly with high-volume EO datasets in near real time.
The Charter Mapper ingests and calibrates hundreds of satellite images from 41 EO missions operated by 24 space agencies and data distributors. It employs cutting-edge technologies—such as Kubernetes, SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC), Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs), and TiTiler—and is implemented by Terradue under ESA’s responsibility. By streamlining data access and analysis, the Charter Mapper allows disaster response teams to focus on extracting actionable information rather than data preprocessing.
More information about the International Charter and the ESA Charter Mapper can be found at https://docs.disasterscharter.org/about/.
Building Regional Capacity
This training in Pretoria is part of UN-SPIDER’s ongoing efforts to strengthen the capacity of national disaster management organizations in Africa to make effective use of space-based information. By working closely with SANSA and ZFL, UN-SPIDER continues to support regional partners in harnessing satellite data for disaster preparedness and coordinated emergency response.
