Climate change is altering land, water and vegetation faster than ground surveys alone can record. Satellite archives reaching back four decades now let analysts see how a catchment, forest or farming region has responded to drought, clearing and warming, and to check whether adaptation and mitigation projects are delivering. Demand for these skills is growing in ministries, universities, utilities, insurers and international programmes that must report verifiable results.

This ten-day course builds that capability from first principles to project delivery. The first half covers the physics of remote sensing, sensor characteristics, image acquisition, pre-processing and classification, so that participants can handle imagery with confidence. The second half applies those foundations to climate monitoring themes: vegetation health, land use change, hydrology, fire, drought, urban heat and biomass. Throughout, participants practise reproducible workflows and learn to quantify uncertainty rather than simply produce attractive maps.

Every day includes computer laboratory work with real imagery from African landscapes. Participants complete an individual monitoring project, presenting methods, results, accuracy figures and a plan to repeat the analysis operationally.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Explain how optical, thermal and radar sensors capture information relevant to climate monitoring.
• Locate, download and manage Landsat, Sentinel and MODIS archives.
• Pre-process imagery through atmospheric correction, cloud masking and mosaicking.
• Compute vegetation, water, moisture and burn indices and interpret anomalies.
• Classify land cover and detect change using supervised and time series methods.
• Run workflows in Google Earth Engine for large-area and multi-year analysis.
• Map flooding, surface water and drought using optical and radar data.
• Assess map accuracy and estimate land cover change areas with uncertainty.

The course is designed for professionals who monitor environmental change from space, including:

• GIS and remote sensing analysts
• Environmental and climate change officers
• Forestry, wildlife and conservation managers
• Agriculture and food security analysts
• Water resources and disaster risk management specialists
• Researchers and lecturers in earth and environmental sciences
• Monitoring, reporting and verification staff on carbon projects
• Development agency staff overseeing resilience and landscape programmes

Participants complete the programme with:

• A tested workflow for downloading and preparing multi-sensor imagery.
• Reusable Google Earth Engine scripts for time series and change detection.
• Maps of vegetation, water and land cover change for an area of interest.
• A drought and anomaly monitoring routine based on long-term baselines.
• An accuracy assessment table that supports credible reporting.
• A completed monitoring project ready to adapt for their organisation.

The programme is computer-lab driven. Participants work through:

• Daily guided labs in QGIS and Google Earth Engine on African study areas
• Short concept briefings that precede each practical task
• Scripted workflows that are provided for reuse and adaptation
• Peer review of map products and accuracy results
• A supervised capstone project on a theme of the participant's choice

Participants who attend the ten days and present a completed monitoring project receive a CPD-accredited Certificate of Completion from Vision Reach Global Consultancy.