The 8^th AARSE international remote sensing conference shall be held in the United Nations Conference Center in Addis Ababa (UNCC-AA) from October 25-29, 2010.

Today, Africa faces major pressing issues: climate change impact, water scarcity, energy shortage, environmental stresses and food crisis, which affect citizens, business and the community at large. Efforts were made by African countries to work out strategies and policies coordinated in the fields of the environment and the sustainable development. On all these challenges, constitution of coherent seamless and up-to-date spatially enabled information is an essential precondition for setting up coordinated policy and strategy.

As the institution responsible for harnessing information for an African Information Society and knowledge economy, as well as developing capacity for the formulation, adaptation, implementation and evaluation of appropriate information, science and technology policies and programs, ECA is provided with exciting opportunities to champion the use of space technology and information services to drive Africa to become more spatially enabled.

Whilst we are developing appropriate responses to the growing demand from users - for simple, convenient access to online information, products and services, we do not forget that to fully leverage the "enabling" capabilities of Earth Observation for development, we still have to encourage and continually increase the use of geospatial data in the decision making processes for sustainable development, economic growth, resource exploitation, environmental protection, exploitation and management, and social progress and to make appropriate geospatial data and information available and easily accessible to the entire community of users.

We are pleased to welcome the participants to the AARSE 2010 Conference in Addis Ababa. The International Programme Committee and the Local Organizing Committee have given all their best to organize this event, accommodate all the requests for participation and thereby providing the opportunity to all of you to present new trends, discuss and share experience with colleagues around the world, linking geography, cartography, geodesy, computer science, mathematics, engineering, agriculture, earth science, environmental health, and many other areas of science and industry. We thank all of you for availing time to participate to this meeting.