The ESA World AgroCommodities (WAC) project and Consortium were well represented at the ESA Living Planet Symposium held in Vienna, 23-27th June 2025.
A special session on the EU Deforestation Free Supply Chain Regulation (EUDR) was held under the umbrella theme “Global Cooperation and Policy Support.” K. Berger from GFZ was a Co-convenor of the session alongside the ESA Technical Officer Z. Szantoi.
Other chairs included T. Blaschke from Department of Geoinformatics – Z_GIS, University of Salzburg and S. Gomez from GAF AG (Germany).
Three main presentations were provided in the session on ESA WAC, and had the aim to raise awareness on the overall project objectives and current achievements, the very strong user engagement with the Competent National Authorities (CNAs) and understanding their requirements as well as the important technical progress to date. The presentations were done by C. Sannier, the Project Co-ordinator from GAF AG, on the overall project: “Development of EO based forest and crop monitoring tools to support Competent National Authorities: the ESA World AgroCommodities Project.”
Another WAC contribution was the “User Requirements from EU Member State Authorities for Verification of Due Diligence for EUDR,” presented by S. Gomez (GAF AG) in collaboration with K. Berger (GFZ), C. Sannier (GAF AG), F. Enssle (GAF AG) and M. Herold (GFZ).
Some technical results of the models being tested for commodity mapping and results of their performances were described in the presentation: “High-Resolution Global Maps of Cocoa Farms Extent” presented by R. Masolele (Wageningen University) in collaboration with J. Reiche (WU), C. Zamora (GFZ), D. Marcos (INRIA), L. Goldman (WRI), K., Berger (GFZ), M. Herold (GFZ).
In the same session an important contribution was made on the status of readiness for EUDR implementation by one of the CNAs: N. Langner from the German Federal Office for Agriculture and Food Germany (BLE) presented in collaboration with S. Nadler from BLE “Insights into EUDR Implementation at BLE: Challenges of applied geodata-analyses for deforestation monitoring.”
Notably, the session was extremely well attended, with the room completely occupied. The audience showed a high level of interest, asking questions that ranged from policy implementation in countries with weak national laws to technical details on deforestation assessment methods and commodity mapping.
