Allow me to respond to this issue based on the UNESCO presence at the recent 15th Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen.  At such a meeting, the UNESCO Director-General, Mrs. Irina Bokova, provided a briefing to the press about the UNESCO’s climate change initiative.

“Thanks to its interdisciplinary capacities, UNESCO can render a unique contribution to mitigation and adaptation to climate change through distinct action in education, the sciences, culture, communication and information. All these efforts are closely coordinated with the response of the entire UN system to the new global challenge.”

UNESCO’s climate change initiative and/or strategy covers the following main pillars.

1.  UNESCO continues to contribute to climate science and the building of the indispensable knowledge base through its Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), in close collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and its International Hydrological Programme (IHP). This work contributes to the better understanding and forecasting of climate phenomena.
2. UNESCO educational activities relate to climate change education, which is being promoted in the context of the UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development.
3. UNESCO’s cultural and biological diversity, as well as cultural heritage, as “UNESCO will assist Member States to harness the iconic values of World Heritage sites and Biosphere Reserves to showcase adaptation and conservation measures”.

Lastly, UNESCO will deal with various ethical and social dimensions of climate change.

At UNESCO we were very pleased to assist Spot Image with the starting of your Planet Action initiative. UNESCO launched in 2001 the “Open Initiative on the use of space technologies for the monitoring of World Heritage sites”. This was a call to the international space community to assist UNESCO through space technologies in the monitoring of World Heritage sites. We immediately understood that Spot Image wanted to launch a similar activity and that both activities, the UNESCO Open Initiative as well as your Spot Image Planet Action initiative, would be complementary.

Spot Image launched Planet Action as an extraordinary response to support climate change activities with the generous offer to use free SPOT satellite data to encourage the use of earth observation data to support local actions to address climate change. In this sense Spot Image shows a deep corporate responsibility. The generous proposal of Spot Image became complementary to our ‘Open Initiative’ and without hesitation we decided to work in partnership with Spot Image.
 

Geo-information technologies allow us to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways, in particular to provide a clear idea of: what happened? where did it happen? Etc...  Therefore it helps us to answer questions and to solve problems by looking at our data in a way that is quickly understood and easily shared.

Satellite images offer in addition that since they are ‘pictures’ of the earth, one can identify terrain patterns and compare changes occurred in the field between images taken today and those taken, for example 20 years ago.

All this information is essential to assist UNESCO Member States in assessing the state of conservation of their UNESCO inscribed sites, in particular today in the area of climate change where the associated effects are affecting our world heritage. For example conservation of tropical forest is becoming a key component for mitigation of climate change.

While developed countries have accurate and updated cartography and the need for satellite data might not be as strong as in developing countries, in these developing countries updated cartography is difficult to obtain, here the support provided by satellite data is extremely valuable.

‘An image is worth a thousand words’ and in this sense satellite imagery is an excellent tool for education, which is a major component of UNESCO’s mission.

I addressed this question already on your first question. UNESCO has its Open Initiative on the use of space technologies to support the World Heritage Convention and therefore, by Spot Image offering space technologies for climate change, we considered that a partnership with Spot Image would bring space technologies to address climate change issues in World Heritage sites.

Jointly Spot Image and UNESCO have started a series of projects to assist UNESCO conservation authorities with the provision of free satellite SPOT data to focus on the climate change thematic. Jointly we are implementing projects to document the Nazca line being affected by climate change, to assess the state of conservation of UNESCO’s tropical forest world heritage. Jointly we do have plans to use all this satellite imagery for educational purposes working in partnership with the European Space Agency.

We are very pleased of our partnership and we thank the generous assistance of Spot Image to UNESCO activities.