10th Workshop on the Global South

Rapid urban expansion, habitat conversion, climate risks, and widening inequalities reshape
regions across the Global South. However, the data needed to know who is affected, where,
and when are often scarce, delayed, or disrupted, particularly as household survey
programmes face funding and operational gaps. Earth observation (EO) can help bridge
these deficits by delivering scientifically rigorous and operationally transferable methods at
policy-relevant spatial and temporal resolutions.
This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to assess the current state of
EO data and methods to analyse transformations, environmental pressures, crises, and
inequalities in the Global South. We will focus on methodological requirements for
robustness and generalisation across sensors (including emerging sources such as night-time
lights [NTL] from SDGSAT-1), geographies, and time, and on integrating bottom-up data
(citizen science, community mapping, administrative records) to reduce bias, strengthen
validation, and align indicators with lived experience. Applications span environmental
hazards, climate risk, urbanisation and settlement dynamics, demographic and
socio-economic conditions, conservation, and agriculture. Cross-cutting sessions will address
FAIR and open data practices, uncertainty quantification, domain shift and transfer learning,
ethical safeguards and data governance, and collaborative capacity-building with local
institutions to ensure sustained, equitable uptake. The aim is to consolidate best practices
and chart a research and implementation agenda that translates EO insights into actionable,
context-aware evidence for policy and the Sustainable Development Goals.

List of topics

  • Urban form, dynamics & complexity (e.g., 3D/terrain-aware urban mapping,
    settlement growth, densification, informality patterns).
  • Poverty, deprivation, liveability & living conditions modelling (EO-derived proxies,
    composite indices, validation with community/citizen data).
  • Natural resources & ecosystem pressure (land/forest cover change, water scarcity,
    soil degradation, coastal change, conservation planning).
  • Population distribution & mobility (gridded population, displacement,
    commuting/seasonality).
  • Climate risk & impacts (heat, flooding, drought, landslides; exposure or impact across
    urban, peri-urban, rural contexts).
  • Managing sustainability challenges with data innovations, e.g., combining sensors
    with EO data, Digital Twins, and Citizen Science.
  • Environmental & socio-economic inequalities (air/noise/green-space access, energy
    deprivation, service accessibility, environmental justice).
  • Crisis analysis & rapid response (disasters, conflict, epidemics; near-real-time EO
    pipelines and decision support).
  • New EO data & methods (hyperspectral, SAR, NLT, multi-sensor or multimodal
    fusion, transfer learning, domain adaptation).
  • Cross-cutting methods & practices: FAIR data, uncertainty quantification, bias and
    domain shift, ethical safeguards & data governance, capacity-building.
  • For all topics, submissions that compare Global South and Global North cases or
    assess how approaches translate across contexts are very welcome

Scientific Committee

Organizers

Angela ABASCAL
Engineer Faculty, Public University of Navarra. angela.abascal@unavarra.es

Monika KUFFER
Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente m.kuffer@utwente.nl