Our natural resources are extracted to create products, which are disposed when they are no longer useful. A circular agriculture is a vision for sustainability, in which waste is rather looked at as raw material, in order to produce something valuable for the environment and for all. The final day of the Geospatial World Forum 2021 started with discussions on “Circular Agriculture: Rethinking Agricultural Value Chains to Prevent Food Loss”.
“I was thinking circular for agriculture. I do not know whether we will achieve circularity but being more sustainable and adapting to climate change are certainly topics of interest today. In the case of developing countries, increasing their production and productivity is a concern. So, there is definitely a connection with the SDGs,” said Mark Noort, Director, HCP international, The Netherlands, who was moderating the session.
Adapting to climate change
In the session on “Technology Showcase”, Peter Rose, Managing Director, Orbica, Germany, said, “We focus on key technology areas and geospatial and extract value from geospatial data for sustainable development.”
He said that they have the insight engine, where they combine data, Artificial Intelligence and two special analysis insights for their customers and other partners. They use location data and combine that with organizational data and build applications.
Rose stated the following points to demonstrate how location can contribute towards sustainability:
- Increasing financial contributions
- Empowering smallholder farmers
- Stakeholder engagement and transparency
Adapting to climate change is one of the biggest challenges for the wine sector. The adaptation strategies and policies must deal with potential impacts, both short and long term; and context specific adaptations are essential to decision making.
Also Read: GWF 2021 Awards acknowledge outstanding contributions to the geospatial domain
Lino Oliveira, Senior Researcher, INESC TEC, Portugal, said, “Our motivation was to develop an instrument capable of supporting winegrowers to become more resilient to climate change. We know that each wine region is unique and it’s essential to identify and prioritize climate change adaptation initiatives. The quality and updating of the information available are crucial for decision-making.”
He also highlighted that INFRAVINI aims to contribute towards making the European wine industry more resilient to climate change. It also wants to help minimize costs and risks through improved management and monitoring of production (quality and quantity of the final product).
Developing innovative geospatial tools to map lands
The last session for the day titled “Enabling circular practices through sustainable urbanization”, began with Mila Koeva, Assistant Professor, University of Twente, the Netherlands, explaining the project on land tenure security and mapping using geospatial technology on which she had been working for four years, and for which they have been awarded this year.
The starting point of the project was the fact that 70% on the land rights are not recorded in the world. Koeva said, “We needed to develop innovative tools to make land rights mapping faster, cheaper, easier and in a more responsible way. To develop the innovation process, we needed to incorporate a broad range of stakeholders and emergent geospatial technologies like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), automated feature extraction, smart sketch maps and sharing and publishing through geocloud services. Our main mission and goal were focused on SDG1, which aims to achieve tenure security for all. We were inspired by the fact that we should develop innovative geospatial tools to speed up the process of land mapping and recording the data for others to use.”
