Pre-emptive mechanisms on managing catastrophes under consideration

Stakeholders of the Sustainable Development Highlands Project through Satellite met in Yaounde yesterday October 29.

Experts in disaster management in the country are currently examining mechanisms by which satellite images could be used to gather viable data decision-makers could use to pre-empt natural catastrophes like the ones that hit Cameroon in the past and recent years. Members of the steering committee of the Sustainable Development Highlands Project through Satellite met in Yaounde yesterday October 29 in the committee's 7th session to examine the path covered and much more to seek ways of revising its activities to stand the test of time.

Sitting in for the Minister of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, who is also chairman of the steering committee, the Secretary General of the Ministry, Gilbert Didier Edoa, noted that natural disasters in the country have caused untold material and human damage and it was necessary to come up with mechanisms for pre-empting such catastrophes. He said the project was an opportunity to come up with a data bank of all geographic information of the country's land so as to have an observatory of how nature is going to behave in the nearest future and seek ways of averting disasters.

Like Charles Assamba Ongodo in charge of the project, Awum Daniel Anaraban, Inspector General in the MINEPAT, said at a time natural disasters are recurrent in the country notably; floods, Lake Nyos 1986 disaster and eruptions here and there, there was need for concerted action. "When the project was set up in 2007, we thought that it was a matter of observing critically and scientifically the movement of nature in highlands. That is why the project at the time focused on trying to look for sustainable development of our highlands through satellite. With this, we needed to know the happenings of the land. But today, it is not only highlands; it now includes all the territory, underground and even in the air. If we are able to know it, we will therefore look for ways of preventing them," Mr Awum said.

As to the path already covered, he said "the committee has not done much because when the project started, people had not yet understood what it meant. We contacted experts from Canada and thought that through them, we could do something better. But it dragged on for long and the Minister of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development decided that the project should not be handled by external people. Reason why we involved our scientists from the Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation and the universities to reformulate the approach to this project."

As to when the country could have a National Information Geographic System, the Inspector General said, "We need to get quality equipment and so it needs money, but the earlier, the better."