9th 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 convenes researchers and practitioners to assess the current state of EO 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.