COPUOS/T.551
Page 11
I now recognize Nigeria and I give the floor to
Mr. Maiyegun.
Mr. O. I. MAIYEGUN (Nigeria)
(interpretation from French): Thank you very much
Mr. Chairman.
(Continued in English) On behalf of the
Nigerian delegation, I am pleased t see you preside
over the activities and the affairs of the forty-ninth
session of this Committee. We are well aware of your
vast experience and record as head of the French Space
Agency and we have no doubt in your ability to
conduct the affairs of this session. We pledge our
support for you and the members of the new Bureau
and we assure you of our cooperation throughout this
session and indeed the subsequent sessions Mr.
Chairman.
We also note with satisfaction the tremendous
progress made by the Committee under the able
chairmanship of Dr. Adigun Ade Abiodun of our
country. We note in particular that the Committee had
been able to follow the progress of the implementation
of UNISPACE III recommendations with two
remarkable achievements. One is the submission of
the reports of UNISPACE III + 5 review to the General
Assembly with the sensitization of the international
community through a press conference organized by
the Committee’s executives and a debate at the fifty-
ninth session of the General Assembly on the
invaluable contribution of space technology to human
development. Two, the creation of the Disaster
Management International Space Coordination, which
we often refer to as DMISCO, entity as a programme
under the Office for Outer Space Affairs, and a joint
effort to implement an integrated global system,
especially through international cooperation, to help
developing countries have access to and be in a
position use space-based technology for risk reduction
and disaster management.
Mr. Chairman, we also would like to
commend, not just for the timely availability of
documents, but the good work and the efforts of the
staff of the Office for Outer Space Affairs, in particular
the Director, Mr. Sergio Camacho-Lara, and the Expert
on Space Applications, Ms. Alice Lee, for their
dedication to duty to ensure the implementation of the
programmes of the Committee and its subsidiary
bodies.
Mr. Chairman, before I proceed to make other
comments, let me, through you, also express the
condolences of our delegation, of our country, to the
people of Indonesia, on the unfortunate disaster in the
Java region. We stand by the ________(?) Indonesia.
We commiserate with them and we join them in
solidarity at this time.
Mr. Chairman, at the forty-eighth session of
the Committee in June 2005, Nigeria gave an update on
the implementation of its space policy and programme
which include the validation of NigeriaSat-1 images
and the use of the images in many areas of socio-
economic development by the user community in
Nigeria. The Committee may wish to note that the
awareness generated through these initiatives has
continued to yield positive results. The National Space
Research and Development Agency is collaborating
and sharing experiences with the University of
Missouri, in Kansas City, in the United States, and the
International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, in
Ibadan, Nigeria, on two projects titled “Satellite-Based
Resource and Environmental Management in the Niger
Delta Area of Nigeria”, and “Development of Models
for Cassava Yield Prediction”, respectively, using
NigeriaSat-1 and other satellite data. Our Agency is
also collaborating with Obafemi Awolowo University,
in Ile-Ife in Nigeria, and the International Institute for
Geo-Information and Earth Observation in The
Netherlands, on capacity-building in the development
GEOFORMIN, a geo-information-based system for
forestry management in Nigeria and, indeed, in Africa.
The programme is an extension of the project titled
“Deforestation and its Implication on Biodiversity in
Nigeria”.
Similarly, Mr. Chairman, the Agency is
promoting satellite-based research in many tertiary
institutions in Nigeria, taking advantage of the
availability of images from NigeriaSat-1 at free or
nominal cost. Thus, the reality of unhindered access to
real-time and affordable satellite data from NigeriaSat-
1 is gaining ground and impacting on sustainable
development efforts in Nigeria.
On 15 November 2005, the Disaster
Monitoring Constellation, DMC, a novel partnership
among five countries, Algeria, China, Nigeria, Turkey
and the United Kingdom, signed an Agreement to join
the International Charter on Space and Major Disaster.
Nigeria, through the DMC, is now being empowered to
trigger the Charter in the event of any disaster in
Nigeria and the West Africa Sub-Region. NigeriaSat-1
and the other satellites in the DMC have been
providing effective services to users globally. These
include the management of the earthquake disasters in
Iran and Kashmir region and the flood disaster
triggered by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in the
United States.