Sitting beside some Asian friends at the First Earth Observation Summit in Washington in 2003, I was too polite to ask what they thought of our American colleagues billing this as the first gathering of political-level support for earth observation.
In fact, the Asia Pacific region has held two Ministerial Conferences - one in Beijing in 1994, and another in New Delhi in 1999. As I am writing this, a third is being planned at the UN-ESCAP headquarters, just down the road from where I am sitting in Bangkok.
Is political support the reason for the continuing interest in remote sensing in this region? Of course! One does not launch satellites paid for by the national treasury without political support.
But why is there that support - and across so many countries, and in so many ways? That is a far more interesting and important question. I believe that the answer is simple. Remote sensing leaders in Asia have focused on issues that are important to the governments and the people. Even scientists in the developing countries have not generally looked at building the next great algorithm. They have been trying to solve real problems. And this has been going on for decades.
Whether it is about dealing with floods in Bangladesh or China, geological mapping in Mongolia, or crop and forest monitoring in Thailand, the focus has been on issues that quicken the pulse of the nation concerned - and their political leaders.
This focus then leads into some other interesting observations. In Thailand, for example, the agency in charge of reception and supplying data is the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA). This instrumentality has built its reputation on receiving low cost data and quickly delivering it to government users. It has been doing this for more than twenty years.
The degree to which the data is used operationally is quite amazing to one conditioned by the reticence of many - but not all, I must hasten to add - government agencies in Canada.
In Thailand, data is used for land use mapping, disaster mitigation, crop and forest monitoring, geological mapping, fishery assessment, tax mapping ... and the list could go on.
Over the past eight months, departments of the national government have bought and paid for enough higher resolution imagery to cover the country - several times.
GISTDA has proven that it can deliver the data. Government agencies have proven that they can not only use it, but that they need it to address issues important to government. The result? Thailand has taken the next step. The first Thai Earth Observation Satellite (THEOS) is to be launched late in 2007 or early in 2008.
THEOS has been designed for an earlier crossing of the equator than SPOT. As a result, it should yield more cloud free data over Thailand and for its tropical friends and neighbours the world over.
Others could take a lesson from Thailand. Address issues important to government, deliver low cost data reliably, and good things happen.
Bob Ryerson bryerson@kimgeomatics.com is a former director general of the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing and the president of Kim Geomatics Corp.
