Context: The Africa OPEN Deal Initiative has made Africa the first continent to complete the collection of comprehensive, harmonized, and accurate digital land use and land-use change data.
Significance

• The initiative shows that science and innovation can provide real solutions. It also indicates that collaboration and pooling experience can lead to the best results.
• FAO’s Assistant director-general and regional representative for Africa said that the information received from the African Open Deal Initiative can also help in the fight against hunger in Africa.

Key Points

• Africa has become the first continent in the world to complete the collection of accurate, comprehensive and harmonised digital land use and land use change data under the Africa Open DEAL initiative.

DEAL stands for Data for the Environment, Agriculture and Land Initiative.

• The data collection and analysis initiative is led by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the African Union Commission (AUC).
• This open data initiative that covered the period between 2018 and 2020, disclosed more forests and arable lands than were previously detected.
• Collect Earth, a free and open-source software developed by FAO, was used to collect data through Google Earth.
• It is part of the set of tools called Open Foris and was developed in 2017 in collaboration with Google Earth, Bing Maps and Google Earth Engine.
• The survey covered 100 parameters on each sampling point of about 0.5 hectares and included tree counts, farmlands, wildfires and existing infrastructure.
• The data from the survey were analyzed to highlight the land-use change in the past 20 years and the potential for restoration at the national level for every country in the continent.
• The key initiative also revealed that 350 million hectares of cropland are cultivated in Africa.This is an increase by 25% over the cropland in the continent. In the year 2018, 279 million hectares of cropland were cultivated in Africa.