In response to the ongoing climate crisis and the pursuit of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UN 2030 agenda, UNITAR, together with Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Technological University Dublin and World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine (WADEM), organised the first Climate Security International Research conference.
The conference was held in Bonn (Germany), hosted at the UN Campus, on the 23rd and 24th of November 2023. The event gathered more than 100 participants and received contributions from more than 25 different countries, including research papers and essays from more than 25 different institutions.
RTDI Project Manager Michele Lazzarini, presented a SatCen Climate Security study focused on Sahel. The study established a methodology to analyse Climate Security scenarios integrating heterogeneous data, coming from EO and non EO sources, and analyzed with ML methods.
The methodology, mainly developed within the H2020 GEM project, is currently expanded in the Horizon Europe SDGs-EYES project. In SDGs-EYES, SatCen is developing a pilot, together with CMCC and SISTEMA, to better understand and monitor the link between climate and security for the Sahel region using the 13.1.1 SDG indicator (Number of deaths, missing persons and directly affected persons attributed to disasters per 100,000 population).
The expected results of the SDGs-EYES climate security pilot will show areas where the indicator is calculated, highlighting the intersections between natural disasters and human presence. This will allow to estimate the number of people affected, updating the indicator when a new event occurs.