The 2nd Regional EUROCLIMA Workshop on Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought (DLDD, http://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/scado) took place between the 22nd and 25th of October 2012 on the premises of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Natal, Brazil.
The organization of this international event was a joint initiative by the Climate Risk Management Unit of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (EC), the Laboratório de Análise e Processamento de Imagens de Satélites (LAPIS) of the Universidade Federal de Alagoas (Maceió, Brazil), and the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais - Centro Regional do Nordeste (INPE/CRN, Brazil).
This second workshop served as a platform for training, capacity building and regional networking. It aimed at reinforcing the participation of Latin America countries in the development of an integrated DLDD Observatory for the region and to ameliorate South-South cooperation and knowledge exchange.
The event brought together more than 30 meteorological, agro-meteorological, drought and land degradation experts from the countries participating in the EUROCLIMA Programme and other interested parties aiming at bridging the gap between scientific research and technological application of methodologies and systems to monitor, assess and mitigate the problems of desertification, land degradation and drought in Latin America.
The first two days of the workshop were dedicated to an intensive training on the use of TerraMA2, a freeware computing platform for developing operational systems for environmental risks monitoring and alerting. The capacity building session was prepared and conducted by Eymar Lopes from INPE and it consisted of practical lectures and hands-on sessions centered on natural hazards’ disasters occurring on Latin America region. This training was very productive and efficient, showed the good condition of the EUROCLIMA group and strengthened the community of TerraMA2 users in the region.
The workshop was concluded with two-day seminar devoted to the exploration of cooperative synergies and coordinated actions among represented countries and institutions for improving knowledge sharing and to foster the structured dialogue between the scientific community and stakeholders regarding the problem of land degradation and drought in Latin America.
The invited guests gave scientific, technical and institutional talks that were followed by 440 cybernauts through a webinar provided by MundoGEO (http://mundogeo.com/) and chaired by Paulo Barbosa and Hugo Carrão from JRC.
A lot of interest from the participants was shown for establishing joint efforts on the study of impacts and consequences of climate change on DLDD processes and events in the region and it was acknowledged that the involvement of academia is a step forward increasing the visibility of the program and the contents of the Observatory.
New data providers and scientific collaborators were assigned, such as the Instituto Nacional do Semiárido (INSA), Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos (CPTEC) and the UNESCO Latin America and the Caribbean Office of Education (OREALC/UNESCO, Santiago). The Ministério para a Ciência e Tecnologia (MCT) of Brazil recognized the importance of the EUROCLIMA Programme for the region and fully supports its implementation.