ESA’s Global Development Assistance (GDA) Transport and Infrastructure activity was presented at the Environmentally Sustainable Transport Regional Meeting and Capacity-Building Workshop, held in Bangkok from 16 to 18 March 2026 at the United Nations Centre for Regional Development. The event provided an opportunity to show how Earth Observation is supporting more practical, climate-informed transport planning across Asia and the Pacific.
Presented through the prototype Climate Exposure Dashboard for Transport, the activity demonstrated how geospatial information can be integrated into the Asian Transport Observatory (ATO) to strengthen its knowledge base with a new spatial perspective on infrastructure exposure. By combining open flood hazard datasets with road network information and established statistical indicators, the dashboard helps identify where major road infrastructure intersects with flood-prone areas across the 21 economies participating in the Aichi 2030 Declaration on Environmentally Sustainable Transport.
The presentation also highlighted growing interest from development finance partners in how Earth Observation can support more resilient infrastructure planning. In his post on the launch, Jamie Leather, Director of Transport at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), described the dashboard as helping to identify “priority corridors for resilience investments” and supporting “data-driven planning for resilient transport infrastructure”.
Supported by ESA and ADB through the GDA programme, the work was developed with IABG and the Asian Transport Observatory to explore how geospatial indicators can complement the Observatory’s existing evidence base, which already brings together more than 450 transport-related indicators. The prototype demonstrates how Earth Observation can be integrated within an existing and well established operational platform already used by transport stakeholders in the region.
The context is pressing. Transport systems across Asia and the Pacific are increasingly exposed to climate-related hazards, particularly flooding. Since the turn of the century, 65% of all global geophysical disasters, more than 40% hydrological and meteorological disasters, and a fourth of all climatological disasters have occurred in the Asia-Pacific (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, 2025). Understanding where infrastructure may be at risk is becoming an important step in building resilience and supporting climate-informed planning, especially in countries where infrastructure gaps remain significant and climate-related damages are expected to rise.
The Bangkok workshop offered a valuable setting to present this approach to representatives from around 25 ESCAP Member States, including Small Island Developing States already benefiting from the Asian Transport Observatory platform. In that context, the activity helped show how Earth Observation can move beyond standalone statistic analysis and contribute to a shared evidence base for transport resilience.
Explore the tool here: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/4ad6cb618f8544b4b3653229b5a42abc
A more detailed overview of the platform and its planned capabilities will follow separately. It will further explore how Earth Observation and established statistical knowledge can be brought together to support transport planning across the region.
