2016 ICT4D Conference

Following more than 20 years of civil unrest, environmental information for Southern Somalia is relatively scarce, but there are clear signs that the war economy - fuelled by the on-going conflict - is rapidly depleting the country's natural resources. Illegal wood charcoal production and export is a major activity. However, there has been little quantitative information on the extent of charcoal production due to the inaccessibility of the area and the difficulty in detecting tree loss or charcoal production sites from publicly available satellite images.

Prosopis juliflora is a fast growing tree species originating from South and Central America and with a high invasive potential in semi-arid areas around the globe. It was introduced to East Africa in the 1970's and 1980's to stabilize dune systems and to provide fuel wood after prolonged droughts and deforestation. The species has expanded rapidly and become difficult to control. It has competitive advantages over native species considering that it is extremely drought tolerant with its thorny thickets invade into drier grasslands and rangelands.

The FAO-executed Somalia Water and Land Information Management project (SWALIM) has applied advanced Remote Sensing and GIS technology to these two threats and provided specific and quantitative evidence which can now help the Somalia authorities and development partners to combat these dangers.