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Ocean

Title: Africa Regional Centres of Excellence - ArcX: Ocean Component. 

The OPERA project (Ocean Prediction Enhancement in Regions of Africa) represents the ArcX Ocean component.

Main Objective: To improve ocean resources sustainability and human welfare by strengthening digital and scientific capacities in ocean monitoring and forecasting in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Specific Objectives:

  1. Build cooperation and foster a coordinated and dynamic African ocean prediction community to enhance regional leadership and global collaboration in ocean monitoring and forecasting
  2. Strengthen African capacities in ocean monitoring and forecasting at national, regional, and pan-African levels, improving access and use of digital ocean resources
  3. Strengthen ocean regional and coastal forecasting systems for Essential Ocean Variables (currents, sea height, temperature, salinity, fish abundance, etc.)
  4. Develop fit-for-purpose ocean data-driven applications and services to support sustainable blue economies, protect coastal communities and safeguard marine ecosystems
  5. Develop an African Digital Twin Ocean/ocean Knowledge Hub framework to enhance sharing, accessibility, and use of digital ocean resources for informed decision-making and continued innovation
  6. Strengthen the uptake and long-term impact of the project’s results by engaging stakeholders and users through co-design, targeted activities and knowledge tools, while fostering private sector participation and stronger links with policy.

Starting Year: 2025
Implementation Duration: 60 months

Areas of Impact:

  1. Support policy and foster long-term commitment to help achieve goals of key ocean related priorities in African and European frameworks and increase long-term support for ocean monitoring and forecasting
  2. Cooperation and community building to expand ocean prediction community in Africa, fostering cooperation within sub-Saharan Africa and with the global community
  3. New services and applications to support disaster risk reduction and response, blue economy and marine conservation efforts
  4. Capacity sharing knowledge & technology transfer
  5. Strengthened capabilities enhance ocean monitoring and forecasting capacities
  6. Stronger science policy pathways and engagement of the private sector.

Target Groups: African governments and decision-makers, Regional Centres of Excellence and scientific institutions, Local and regional authorities involved in coastal management and risk reduction, Blue economy stakeholders (fishing, aquaculture, maritime transport, offshore energy, etc.), Civil society (coastal communities, NGOs, citizen scientists).

ArcX Partners: See ArcX Partners card and ArcX Partnership Map.

Component Coordinator: Mercator Ocean International, as coordinator of the OceanPrediction Decade Collaborative Centre (Click here to register).

Leading Regional Centre of Excellence (RCoE): Mercator Ocean International

Scientific and Technical Support: Capacity Development – UNESCO Chair of Mathematical Physics and Applications CIPMA), Gulf of Guinea Ocean Sciences Summer School (GGOSSS), University of Abomey Calavi

Available Resources
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11
Biodiversity & Forest Ocean
Important Marine Mammal Areas (IMMAs)
IUCN
IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC)
The IUCN IMMA layer identifies specific habitat areas crucial for one or more marine mammal species, which may be suitable for conservation through delineation and management. IMMAs represent regions that could benefit from targeted protection and/or monitoring. They serve as a marine mammal data layer highlighting important biodiversity, and potentially ecosystem health, which can be prioritized for protection and management by governments, intergovernmental organizations, conservation groups, and the public.
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Biodiversity & Forest Climate Change Resilience Ocean
Global Distribution of Seagrasses (Polygons)
UNEP-WCMC
Seagrass is found on all continents except Antarctica, covering roughly 0.1% of the ocean floor. However, its global extent remains inadequately mapped, with estimates varying between 160,387 km² and 670,000 km², posing a significant challenge for conservation efforts. The UNEP-WCMC seagrass dataset indicates that Africa harbors approximately 12% of the world’s seagrass.
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Biodiversity & Forest Climate Change Resilience Ocean
Global Distribution of Seagrasses (Points)
UNEP-WCMC
Seagrass is found on all continents except Antarctica, covering roughly 0.1% of the ocean floor. However, its global extent remains inadequately mapped, with estimates varying between 160,387 km² and 670,000 km², posing a significant challenge for conservation efforts. The UNEP-WCMC seagrass dataset indicates that Africa harbors approximately 12% of the world’s seagrass.
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Ocean
Hydrological Basins in Africa
FAO
This dataset provides the hydrological boundaries for major river basins and sub-basins across the African continent. Developed by the FAO Land and Water Division under the AQUASTAT program, the data delineates Africa’s drainage systems based on a hydrologically corrected Digital Elevation Model (DEM) at a 1 km resolution. Designed for use within GIS-based water resource information systems, this dataset serves as a foundational layer for analyzing African hydrology. It was originally published as part of the FAO Land and Water Digital Media Series #13: "Atlas of Water Resources and Irrigation in Africa."
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Water Ocean
Water Occurrence (1984-2020)
EC-JRC
Surface water affects many aspects of our world: the exchange of heat, gas and water vapour between the planet's surface and atmosphere. Water is the engine behind the distribution, movement and migration of Earth's plant and animal life and is just as essential for humans. It affects our capacity to grow crops and manage animal grazing lands, to run our industrial processes, to manufacture goods, it influences the movement of disease-vectors, toxins and pollutants, it generates energy directly (hydroelectric) and indirectly (thermoelectric), it is an essential part of our transport network, and forms part of our recreational, cultural and sporting world. The Water Occurrence dataset shows where surface water occurred between 1984 and 2018. Open water is any stretch of water open to the sky, and includes both freshwater and saltwater. The map displays water surfaces greater than 30m2 that are visible from space, including natural (rivers, lakes, coastal margins and wetlands) and artificial water bodies (reservoirs formed by dams, flooded areas such as opencast mines and quarries, flood irrigation areas such as paddy fields, and water bodies created by hydro-engineering projects such as waterway and harbour construction). This product captures both the intra and inter-annual variability and changes. The permanent water surfaces (100% occurrence over 36 years) are represented in blue, and areas where water sometimes occurs are shown in shades of pink to purple (0% < occurrence < 100%). The paler shades are areas where the water occurs less frequently. The map can support better informed water-management decision-making.
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Ocean
Wetlands
DHI-GRAS
Water is essential for life on Earth and a critical natural resource that underpins all social and economic activity. Ensuring water and sanitation for all is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 6) of the 2030 Agenda. Target 6.6 specifically aims to protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including wetlands. This map shows the total area covered by inland vegetated wetlands. It includes swamps, marshes, peatlands, bogs and fens, the vegetated parts of floodplains as well as rice paddies and flood recession agriculture.
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Ocean
Hydropower - Reservoirs
EC-JRC
Higher energy demands in Africa has led to a wide expansion of the number of hydropower sites, mainly between the 1960s and 1980s. The construction of dams causes impoundments of rivers and reservoirs in the regions of dam influence, with higher evaporation and water temperatures due to increased water surfaces. This map shows the he surface area (sqkm) of African reservoirs subject to hydropower production for the year 2016. It includes reservoirs of associated hydropower plants with installed capacities above 5MW. Apart from this, only reservoirs with a detected dam-caused impoundment of water surface are considered.
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Ocean
Hydropower - Energy production per country
EC-JRC
Many African countries, especially in the Sub-Saharan region highly depend on hydropower which is one of the energy sources that are most affected by droughts. At the same time hydropower has a huge impact on water consumption (mainly through evaporation from reservoir surfaces) in comparison with other fuel types despite having higher densities of plants and installed capacities. Hydropower accounts for 15% of Africa’s energy production. This map shows the energy production (GWh) of hydropower plants with an installed capacity above 5MW, aggregated for each hydropower-generating country in Africa for year 2016.
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Ocean Climate Change Resilience
Aridity (areas of concern)
EC-JRC
Aridity represents the ‘dryness’ of the climate. Dry areas have a higher potential for land degradation. This layer displays the areas of concern for aridity related issues derived from the convergence of global evidence of human-environment interactions that can lead to land degradation. It highlights dryland areas, where the Aridity Index (ratio of precipitation to evapotranspiration) is inferior to 0.65. This layer is part of the World Altas of Desertification
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Ocean
Irrigation (areas of concern)
EC-JRC
Irrigation enables farmers to increase crop production by reducing their dependence on natural rainfall. It is considered a vital part of ensuring food security in the future. Yet it also causes extensive environmental damage and undermines human resilience to water scarcity. Irrigation is responsible for 70 % of all freshwater withdrawals in the globe. Human induced salinisation is a widespread problem as around 30 % of irrigated land are affected and becoming commercially unproductive. This layer displays the areas of concern for irrigation related issues, derived from the convergence of global evidence of human-environment interactions that can have land degradation consequences. This layer is part of the World Altas of Desertification
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Water Ocean
HydroBasins
hydrosheds
HydroBASINS is a global, vectorized layer of hierarchically nested sub-basin boundaries. It provides seamless coverage and uses the 'Pfafstetter' coding system offering a 12 scales breakdown to enable analysis of catchment topology and up/downstream connectivity. Extracted from HydroSHEDS at 15 arc-second resolution, this layer is part of the HydroATLAS collection.
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