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Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have agreed to push for better cooperation in the use of the region’s space technology, including Indonesia’s remote sensing satellite project.

The idea was proposed during a meeting of the Sub-Committee on Space Applications in Nusa Dua, Bali, at the end of last month, which was attended by nine of the 10 member countries of Asean, an executive of the Indonesian National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (Lapan) said on Friday.

The committee’s main objective is to formulate a framework to improve cooperation in the use of space technology and its application. It also hopes to implement a space technology program and a project for sustainable development for Asean members.

Lapan secretary Bambang Koesoemanto said the forum had agreed to focus on a united Asean effort toward satellite technology over the next few years.

He said that Indonesia’s remote sensing satellite was part of the technology that could be put to wider use. Remote sensing, he said, was used for land surveillance to collect information on changes to the earth’s surface.

This includes a variety of applications such as monitoring crops, potential fishing zones, tidal flows and forest fires, as well as for disaster mitigation. The remote sensing has been used recently to monitor disasters such as the Situ Gintung dam break and the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake.

“Moreover, several Asean countries have proposed a remote sensing application [to monitor the land] for crops such as rice, funded by the Asean-Pakistan partnership, and for crops such as rubber,” said Bambang, who co-chaired the meeting.

He said the committee had developed several partnerships for the coming years, including training in the use of satellite imaging for disaster management, space technology development workshops and an altimetry satellite data workshop.

The forum has also started work on rubber harvest predictions by using remote sensing and a geographic information system, rice monitoring and harvest prediction, and mapping natural heritage sites.

Mawardi Nur, head of Lapan’s cooperation and public relations bureau, said that Indonesia had one satellite but some Asean members, such as Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Brunei, had not yet acquired their own and relied on buying data from other countries

“So now our focus is to work on our human resources,” he said.