The power of Earth Observation isn’t just on the hardware side, or in the profusion of satellites that are becoming cheaper to build and launch, or in the sensors they carry. It is also on the software side, in the AI/ML-built algorithms that squeeze more precise, actionable information out of them.
There is already a huge amount of information that is just begging to be used more systematically to help reduce our climate footprint and slow global warming, to name just two of our priorities. We use AI to fuse data from multiple satellites and to match earth observations with our vast database of millions of industrial and energy assets.
These software advances have been key to bringing the level of near real-time transparency along many climate and environmental metrics.
Tackling Uncertainty
The world is heating up both meteorologically and politically, becoming more unstable on many fronts. Instability isn’t usually a recipe for growth and robustness. Neither are climate catastrophes. But geospatial is at the very least a powerful mitigating factor, a tool that can be used to manage all this uncertainty and unpredictability, which will even help slow global warming, if rightly used. It is not optional. Geospatial data and applications are key to measure things.
As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. The transparency provided by geospatial makes it possible to manage our climate footprint in a meaningful way and take effective action to tackle the climate emergency – and to do so cost-efficiently. There is a proliferation of data, and each new data stream unlocks a wealth of use cases. Some of these use cases are so new that a lot of market education needs to be done to get traction.
But there really is no contradiction between economic necessity and demands for sustainability. It is a false dichotomy. The cost of ignoring demands for sustainability is orders of magnitude greater than that of tackling them.
Many climate and sustainability solutions are revenue generating and can unlock opportunities that would not otherwise exist. Building clean energy projects is regions that had remained beyond the reach of modern energy services is a case in point.
Climate Governance
Climate change knows no borders. Neither does geospatial tech. Transparency on climate issues brought by geospatial can set the stage for a new climate governance regime. For example, outlawing methane super-emitters is now technically within reach, thanks to geospatial monitoring.
Such a measure could slow global warming by 0.3 to 0.5°C in less than five years. Methane mitigation is the poster child for geospatial-enabled measures that could change the trajectory of climate change. We cannot dream of achieving our climate goals without tackling anthropogenic methane emissions really fast. Geospatial makes that possible.
Unrivalled Tools
Satellites are key for methane tracking in at least two ways. They see emission events that for the most part could not be seen otherwise, such as massive but intermittent emission events known as super-emitters. They also measure leaks that can’t be measured from the ground.
There is a widespread misperception that local in-situ sensors hold the ground truth while satellites are just an approximation. Nothing could be further from the truth: because of the way methane disperses, many large leaks or releases cannot be properly measured with local sensors, but can be accurately and precisely quantified from space. But even more importantly, satellite monitoring of methane is independent.
The granularity, spatial resolution, revisit frequency, coverage, sensitivity and cost-efficiency of satellites keep getting better. This makes them an unrivalled tool of accountability for methane emissions.
Methane abatement is the number one priority for climate action, for reasons that are thankfully becoming familiar: it is the fastest growing greenhouse gas and a very potent one, with roughly 85 times the warming power of CO2 in the first 20 years. Many anthropogenic methane emissions are comparatively easy to avoid.
With geospatial, methane footprint can be reduced quickly and carbon space can be opened up to tackle longer term measures to reduce CO2 and transition to a lower-carbon economy.
Disclaimer: Views Expressed are Author's Own. Geospatial World May or May Not Endorse it
