INTERVIEW: How RCMRD and AWS are Helping 24 African Countries Protect Biodiversity

Governments across Eastern and Southern Africa are facing a difficult balancing act: protecting some of the world’s most important ecosystems while meeting an ambitious global commitment to conserve at least 30% of terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030.

The target is part of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF), adopted by 196 countries at the UN Biodiversity Conference, COP15, in December 2022. The framework contains 23 targets for 2030, including a requirement for countries to establish effectively managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas and other conservation measures.

The urgency is considerable. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that around 1 million species are threatened with extinction, with biodiversity loss already affecting the lives and livelihoods of billions of people. The global framework also identifies a biodiversity finance gap of about $700 billion a year, highlighting the scale of resources needed to reverse nature loss.

For African governments, however, achieving the 30-by-30 ambition is not simply a question of increasing the number of protected areas. Countries need reliable information on where ecosystems and threatened species are located, how landscapes are changing and whether conservation areas are effectively connected and managed.

That creates a major data challenge. Environmental information is frequently spread across government agencies, research institutions and conservation organisations, using different datasets, formats and systems. Without interoperable and regularly updated information, governments can struggle to identify conservation priorities, monitor changes and produce the evidence required for international biodiversity reporting.

The Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) is attempting to address that problem through its Regional Centre of Excellence (RCoE) for Biodiversity, Forests and Seascape Ecosystems Management. The initiative supports 24 countries across Eastern and Southern Africa, providing a regional geospatial data platform, biodiversity maps, policy briefs and technical capacity-building to help governments monitor ecosystems and improve the planning and management of protected and conserved areas.

At the centre of the initiative is the RCoE Geospatial Platform, a cloud-based system that brings together biodiversity, forest, satellite, protected-area and other environmental information. By making this information available through a common geospatial environment, the platform is designed to help policymakers and conservation practitioners move from fragmented datasets to actionable intelligence.

The platform also has a direct link to the global 30-by-30 agenda. Esri says the RCoE initiative supports countries in monitoring ecosystems and improving conservation planning while contributing to reporting under Target 3 of the KM-GBF.

The scale of the regional initiative is significant. RCMRD’s RCoE programme currently covers 24 countries, from Angola and Botswana to Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and is scheduled to run from 2024 to 2028.

The work has also received international recognition. In 2026, RCMRD received the Esri Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award, which recognises organisations demonstrating leadership and innovation in the use of geospatial technology. Esri specifically cited RCMRD’s work using GIS and Earth observation to strengthen biodiversity conservation and evidence-based environmental decision-making across Eastern and Southern Africa.

The recognition comes as geospatial technologies become increasingly important to conservation. Satellite imagery, geographic information systems and cloud computing can allow governments to analyse large volumes of spatial data, track changes in ecosystems and protected areas, and present complex environmental information in formats that policymakers can use.

We spoke to Ngugi Kimani, Geospatial Data and Technologies Manager at RCMRD, about the RCoE Geospatial Platform, what the Esri award means for Africa’s geospatial community, and how cloud-based technologies and Earth observation are changing the way governments across the region collect, analyse and use environmental data.

1. What challenge is the RCoE Geospatial Platform solving and why does it matter?

Across Eastern and Southern Africa, countries are making critical decisions about where to protect forests, restore degraded landscapes, manage wildlife and respond to climate change, yet much of the information they need is scattered across institutions, stored in incompatible formats, or simply unavailable to decision makers.

Without integrated systems, countries cannot credibly track whether they’re protecting the ecosystems, their populations, economies and climate resilience depend on, let alone report that progress to the world. A region racing against a 2030 deadline cannot afford to make that case on guesswork.

That’s the gap Regional Centre of Excellence (RCoE) for Biodiversity, Forests and Seascape Ecosystems Management was built to close. It is a component of the Africa Regional Centres of Excellence (ArcX) programme funded by the European Union and co-implemented by the RCMRD and Landscape Alliance. The platform brings together trusted biodiversity, protected area, satellite and environmental data into a single cloud-based system so governments, conservation organizations and researchers can access the same up-to-date information and make faster, evidence-based decisions.

2. What measurable impact has the platform achieved to date?

Since launching in October 2024, the RCoE Geospatial Platform has grown into a regional conservation resource. RCMRD has trained more than 5,000 people in geospatial technologies by combining satellite imagery, mapping and geographic data to support conservation planning while building an online community of over 1,100 members and engaging more than 3,200 participants through arts and mapping competitions designed to raise biodiversity awareness.

The platform has also strengthened regional cooperation. RCMRD has signed 17 data-sharing agreements and expanded collaboration through four strategic partnerships to improve access to environmental information. New analytical tools, including Geo Hex, are being developed to help governments identify priority areas for conservation, ecosystem restoration and biodiversity protection more accurately across national borders.

3. Can you share a real example where the platform made a measurable difference?

Kenya’s commitment to protecting 30% of its land and sea by 2030 depends on accurate information about existing protected areas and important biodiversity sites. Through the RCoE platform, Kenyan conservation agencies accessed standardized geospatial information that supported protected area planning, biodiversity reporting and national decision-making.

During the preparation of Kenya’s Seventh National Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the platform enabled technical teams to work from a common, authoritative data source, significantly reducing time spent collecting and validating information from multiple agencies. RCMRD supported the consolidation of Kenya’s protected area data into a centralized geoportal and worked closely with the government to coordinate data collection, compile datasets and successfully submit the report.

This evidence-based approach contributed to Kenya’s successful mobilization of international financing, including support from the Kunming Biodiversity Fund and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) through the United Nations Environment Programme. These resources are now being used to assess remaining biodiversity gaps and update Kenya’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP), ensuring national conservation priorities align with KM-GBF goals. 

This same evidence base underpins the recently launched Biodiversity Outlook for Eastern and Southern Africa (BOESA), a flagship regional outlook delivering geospatial intelligence to conserve nature and empower communities sustainably across the region. BOESA offers a comprehensive assessment of biodiversity, forests, and seascapes, consolidating regional data, country-level insights, and emerging trends into a single platform bridging science, policy, and implementation. It also features three key tools: WDPCA Validator an AI tool that simplifies protected area reporting; 30×30 Tracker which tracks progress toward the 30×30 target and the KM-GBF Capacity Needs Assessment (CNA) Tool, a web-based platform helping institutions assess, track, and plan capacity development in support of the KM-GBF.

4. Why is this work particularly relevant in the context of climate change?

Across Eastern and Southern Africa, ecosystems face increasing pressure from climate change. Conservation decisions made too late, or made without evidence, are decisions that can’t be undone – a wetland drained, a species pushed past recovery, a protected area degraded beyond its buffer capacity. The near-threatened status of species like the Southern White Rhino is a reminder that the region’s conservation challenges are unfolding in real time, on a clock with a hard deadline.

The RCoE feeds directly into KM-GBF Target 3 by integrating systems that track what’s happening on the ground, replacing fragmented and inaccessible data with a platform built to support countries with better, faster decision-making.

5. How has AWS enabled or accelerated this impact?

AWS removed the infrastructure ceiling. Instead of building expensive physical infrastructure that individual countries would struggle to maintain, the platform securely delivers geospatial services across 24 nations from a single cloud environment. As demand has grown, the platform has scaled without interruption allowing thousands of users, from protected area managers and researchers to government ministries, to access the same information regardless of location.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) stores and serves the platform’s heaviest geospatial products including satellite imagery layers, biodiversity datasets and interactive map books giving nearly 900,000 geoportal visitors on-demand access to data that would otherwise sit locked in local servers or shipped on hard drives.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and AWS Amplify enable new tools and services to be deployed in days rather than months, allowing additional countries to access spatial tools for biodiversity reporting and enabling the 30×30 Target 3 Tracker to ingest protected area data from 24 nations simultaneously without bottlenecks.

Perhaps most critically, AWS-hosted training infrastructure enabled RCMRD to train more than 5,000 participants concurrently on conservation planning and spatial analysis tools. This scale would have been physically and financially impossible through traditional delivery.

And finally, the outcome is not simply a technology story but an accessibility story. A protected area manager in Mozambique and a policy analyst in Ethiopia can access the same platform, the same data and the same analytical tools with the same speed and reliability as someone in Nairobi. AWS has made the RCoE’s impact borderless, always on and scalable, allowing the platform’s reach to grow faster than the biodiversity challenges it was built to address.

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