The goal of SERVIR South East Asia (formerly known as SERVIR Mekong) is to enhance climate change adaptation and landscape management in the Lower Mekong region through the increased application of geospatial analysis to critical, urgent, or common policy and planning needs, especially in the context of disaster risk reduction and response, Mekong basin development, water security, food security, and landscape management to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The project objectives, corresponding results, indicators, targets, and activities to explain how the ADPC team expects to address the needs and challenges are provided in the Performance Management Plan given in Annex 1. A summary table on results and result indicators is provided in the Proposed Results/Outcomes section.
SIG played a key role in the development and implementation of SERVIR-Mekong, part of the SERVIR Global Program. SERVIR, a joint initiative of NASA and USAID, helps developing countries use information from Earth-observing satellite data and geospatial technologies. Through institutions known as SERVIR hubs, SERVIR is active in five regions: Eastern and Southern Africa, Hindu Kush–Himalaya, Lower Mekong, West Africa, and Amazonia.
SERVIR-Mekong promotes the use of satellite imagery and related geospatial decision-support tools and products to help decision-makers in Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam better predict and manage floods and other natural disasters, improve agricultural risk management, manage land-use more sustainably, and help governments and communities increase resilience to the negative effects of climate change. SERVIR SEA is being implemented by the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) with inputs from SIG, Stockholm Environment Institute, and Deltares. SIG has been heavily involved in geospatial tool development, service delivery, and capacity building. SIG’s contributions include development of geospatial tools for flood forecasting and monitoring, issuing alerts for forest degradation and deforestation, and monitoring the impact of biophysical improvement projects. SIG also has provided tool-related support such as technical documentation, user guides, and training, as well as capacity development and knowledge-transfer activities.
SIG collaborated with NASA (via SERVIR), the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC) and various other institutes on the development of RLCMS. This new system leverages the newest technologies in the field of cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence to create yearly land cover maps from satellite data. The fully customizable RLCMS is currently being used by various institutes for cross-country comparative analyses of land use and land cover change. RLCMS produces consistent time series products using free long term historical Landsat and MODIS data. The purpose of this system is to facilitate the production of custom, high-quality land cover information products to serve a variety of policy, planning, management, and reporting needs of regional and national institutions in the Lower Mekong Region. The system leverages the power of Google Earth Engine and relies in most cases on field observations and the interpretation of high resolution imagery by stakeholders relevant to a given project. Once the system has been customized to produce a given product or set of products, these can be updated regularly in a structured way to serve ongoing monitoring needs. The system enables users to benchmark current conditions and sets a baseline for future reporting of progress in land governance.