The EAC Observatory is housed within the East African Community Secretariat in Arusha, Tanzania, to serve the specific needs of the East African sub-region. This Observatory node is the first one to be established in the Eastern and Southern African region by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in the framework of the EU-funded Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management (BIOPAMA) programme.

The vision for the Observatory node is to provide support to policy and decision makers on key threats to protected areas and biodiversity, initially focussing on land/resource-use conflict between biodiversity conservation and other uses such as agriculture, extractive industry or infrastructure development. A key component of the Observatory node is the Regional Reference Information System (RRIS), which was developed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Union, based in Ispra, Italy.  The initial content of the RRIS (in Aug 2015) is drawn from global datasets and some primary regional datasets. The regional data currently focusses on the overlap between the extractive industries concessions and protected areas.

Read more about it in the new EAC Observatory information sheet.