Abstract:
Sustainable environmental management is one of the key development goals of the 21st century.
The importance of Earth observation (EO) for addressing current environmental problems is
well recognized. Most developing countries are highly susceptible to environmental
degradation; however, the capacity to monitor these changes is predominantly located in the
developed world. Decades of aid and effort have been invested in capacity development (CD)
with the goal of ensuring sustainable development. Academics, given their level of freedom and
their wider interest in teaching and knowledge transfer, are ideally placed to act as catalyst for
capacity building. In this letter, we make a novel investigation into the extent to which the EO
academic research community is engaged in capacity development. Using the Web of
Knowledge publication database (http://wok.mimas.ac.uk), we examined the geographical
distribution of published EO related research (a) by country as object of research and (b) by
authors’ country of affiliation. Our results show that, while a significant proportion of EO
research (44%) has developing countries as their object of research, less than 3% of publications
have authors working in, or affiliated to, a developing country (excluding China, India and
Brazil, which not only are countries in transition, but also have well established EO capacity).
These patterns appear consistent over the past 20 years. Despite the wide awareness of the
importance of CD, we show that significant progress on this front is required. We therefore
propose a number of recommendations and best practices to ease collaboration and open access.
