Lorenzo De Simone

Lorenzo De Simone is a PhD in Agricultural Engineering. He is the Technical Adviser for the Geospatial under the Office of the Chief Statistician of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In this role, he develops methods for the use of EO data for land cover and land use mapping, for official agricultural statistics, SDG reporting, and the SEEA-EEA and advises countries on EO solutions to reach their national objectives.

He has implemented national land cover and land use mapping projects in 16 countries, supporting the modernization of National Statistics Offices, with the aim of building technical capacity in the operational use of EO data for official agricultural statistical purposes and for the purpose of SDG reporting. In 2020, he developed the new FAO methodology to measure SDG 15.4.2  relying solely on geospatial data.

He is serving as the Co-chair of the UN Task Team on EO data for Agricultural Statistics under the UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistc, and is the Chair of the Board of the EO4SDG