Earth Observation Services in Support of West Africa’s Blue Economy: Coastal Resilience and Climate Impacts

The marine and coastal resources of the West Africa region contribute immensely to the global economy as well as to the economies of countries in the region. The region boasts of two vibrant Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs), namely the Canary Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME) and the Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem (GCLME), which provide vast fisheries and other marine resources. The region and its marine and coastal resources are however faced with diverse threats such as climate change, destruction of mangroves, overfishing, habitat destruction and coastal erosion, among many others. Several initiatives have been developed to address these challenges. This paper reviews some of the past as well as ongoing initiatives that address the challenges in the marine and coastal environment of West Africa. Among these initiatives is the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) and Africa programme which uses Earth Observation (EO) data and derived information to manage marine and coastal resources, with focus on the “Marine and Coastal Areas Management in western Africa” theme implemented by the University of Ghana (UG). The Regional Marine Centre (RMC) at the University of Ghana, which serves as the Regional Implementation Centre for the GMES and Africa marine programme for West Africa, uses sentinel-1 satellite data to monitor shoreline change. This information is combined with other datasets to generate coastal vulnerability indices (CVI) map for erosion hotspots in the region, which directly feeds into policy initiatives towards addressing the problem of coastal erosion in the region. This, as a result, contributes to building coastal resilience and alleviating the severe impacts of climate change on the West Africa coast, and contributing to the Blue Economy agenda.