WaPOR was recognized with the GEO SDG Award

WaPOR, formally “Water Productivity through Open access of Remotely sensed derived data”, monitors land and water productivity by remote sensing. The project was recognized by its groundbreaking contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the fifth annual GEO SDG Awards.

The prizes were organized by Earth Observations for the Sustainable Development Goals (EO4SDG) Initiative under the auspices of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) at an award ceremony in Cape Town, South Africa. The jury comprised a set of experts from different countries and sectors whose selection criteria were the overall impact, quality and soundness of the Earth observation endeavours and their potential for replication and upscaling.

GEO is a partnership of more than 100 national governments and even more participating organizations, representing researchers, data providers and businesses, that advocates for the use of coordinated, comprehensive and sustained geospatial monitoring to support decisions and actions that benefit mankind. GEO coordinates a “system of systems” that includes more than 400 million open-data resources from an array of providers including NASA and the European Space Agency as week as commercial actors.

FAO won the SDG Custodian Agency Prize for the pathbreaking WaPOR portal, and also shared the prize for Statistical-Geospatial Integration for its work with the Lesotho Bureau of Statistics in developing a rapid method of monitoring land cover and ecosystems, key components of SDG 15.