You’ve probably heard about the plague of plastic trash in the oceans. You’ve seen YouTube videos of sea turtles with drinking straws in their noses, or whales with stomachs full of marine litter. But how much plastic is out there? Where is it coming from? We don’t really know, because we haven’t measured it. “There’s a paucity of data,” says Marcus Eriksen, cofounder of the 5 Gyres Institute, a nonprofit focused on ending plastic pollution.
Marine litter isn’t the only hazard whose contours we can’t fully see. The United Nations has 93 indicators to measure the environmental dimensions of “sustainable development,” and amazingly, the UN found that we have little to no data on 68 percent of them—like how rapidly land is being degraded, the rate of ocean acidification, or the trade in poached wildlife. Sometimes this is because we haven’t collected it; in other cases some data exists but hasn’t been shared globally, or it’s in a myriad of incompatible formats. No matter what, we’re flying blind. “And you can’t manage something if you can’t measure it,” says David Jensen, the UN’s head of environmental peacebuilding.
In other words, if we’re going to help the planet heal and adapt, we need a data revolution. We need to build a “digital ecosystem for the environment,” as Jensen puts it.
The good news is that we’ve got the tools. If there’s one thing tech excels at (for good and ill), it’s surveillance, right? We live in a world filled with cameras and pocket computers, titanic cloud computing, and the eerily sharp insights of machine learning. And this stuff can be used for something truly worthwhile: studying the planet.
There are already some remarkable cases of tech helping to break through the fog. Consider Global Fishing Watch, a nonprofit that tracks the world’s fishing vessels, looking for overfishing. They use everything from GPS-like signals emitted by ships to satellite infrared imaging of ship lighting, plugged into neural networks. (It’s massive, cloud-scale data: over 60 million data points per day, making the AI more than 90 percent accurate at classifying what type of fishing activity a boat is engaged in.)
“If a vessel is spending its time in an area that has little tuna and a lot of sharks, that’s questionable,” says Brian Sullivan, cofounder of the project and a senior program manager at Google Earth Outreach. Crucially, Global Fishing Watch makes its data open to anyone—so now the National Geographic Society is using it to lobby for new marine preserves, and governments and nonprofits use it to target illicit fishing.
If we want better environmental data, we’ll need for-profit companies with the expertise and high-end sensors to pitch in too. Planet, a firm with an array of 140 satellites, takes daily snapshots of the entire Earth. Customers like insurance and financial firms love that sort of data. (It helps them understand weather and climate risk.) But Planet also offers it to services like Global Forest Watch, which maps deforestation and makes the information available to anyone (like activists who help bust illegal loggers). Meanwhile, Google’s skill in cloud-based data crunching helps illuminate the state of surface water: Google digitized 30 years of measurements from around the globe—extracting some from ancient magnetic tapes—then created an easy-to-use online tool that lets resource-poor countries figure out where their water needs protecting.
Tech can empower ordinary people too. To tackle the marine litter mystery, Eriksen and other antipollution groups built an app that hundreds of volunteers used to map the banks of the Los Angeles River, where trash was entering the marine ecosystem. Now cities can use that data to do surgical interventions, like identifying hot spots that need more trash cans or more frequent cleanup.
“It’s totally scalable,” Eriksen says, and groups from Ecuador to Hawaii plan to use the app for their own surveys. The citizen-involvement angle has serious legs: In China, 300 million people use an app made by Alipay that lets them donate money to plant forests and then monitor their growth via satellite and land-camera imagery. (They’ve planted over 13 million trees already.) This participation by everyday folks, as Jensen argues, builds crucial political support for environmental action.
Whole Earth, Cataloged.
September 26th, 2019
Via Wired, an interesting look at how – if we’re going to save Earth, we need a clear picture of all the forces that are destroying it – which means capturing more data:
Now, I don’t want to soft-pedal the task at hand. We’re way behind where we should be on nearly every environmental goal. But for once, tech offers a rare all-good-news story. When you’re fumbling around in the dark, the first step is to turn on the lights.
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Read More »Satellite-Connected Tags Set To Boost Marine Conservation
August 5th, 2019
Via Space Daily, a report on a new satellite based sensor to help marine conservation:
Four tiger sharks have been tagged with a new device that will help conservationists to conduct detailed analysis of their migrations over years.
The device, developed in collaboration with ESA, is smaller and more durable than existing tags, as well as being cheaper and more animal friendly.
It records pressure – indicating the depth of the shark – temperature, light level and tilt to enable three-dimensional mapping.
The tiger sharks were tagged off the coast of Saba in the Dutch Caribbean, during an expedition organised by the Dutch Elasmobranch Society, the Saba Conservation Foundation and Nature Foundation Sint Maarten.
“It’s important to track these animals over an extended period of time, as their migratory patterns can be long and far. Ideally you want to track them for several years,” says Irene Kingma of the Dutch Elasmobranch Society.
“The potential of the new technology used in these tags is amazing as it allows us to collect more data for a longer period of time.
“As ESA has the objective to have the tags produced at a considerably lower price point than the current tags on the market, this could change the way tagging is done in the future,” she says.
The tags communicate with passing satellites. This is known as “a handshake” and takes only minimal power – about the equivalent of sending a text message from a mobile phone.
Once the first contact has been made, the information is transferred. On receiving an acknowledgment from a satellite that its data has been received, the tag stops retransmitting.
This efficiency draws less battery power, making the tag last up to five times longer than existing devices that repeatedly retransmit their information.
The smaller and lighter tag can also hold more data. In fact, once the information has been uploaded to the satellite, the tag can clear its memory and start collecting new readings.
The results so far have shown that the device is highly accurate and robust.
“This technology opens the door to brand new possibilities. Currently tiger sharks are observed infrequently and it is difficult to say where they are. We don’t know about their breeding grounds or where they go,” says Tadzio Bervoets, director of the Nature Foundation Sint Maarten, who is charge of the tagging.
“With this revolutionary new tag we are able to better determine the migratory patterns of these critically important yet threatened apex predators and enact management solutions throughout their migratory range within the Caribbean basin.”
ESA worked with AnSem in Belgium under its programme of Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) to develop the Artic microchip used in the devices. It was built into a marine tag manufactured by Star Oddi in Iceland.
The tag works in conjunction with the Argos satellite monitoring system operated by CLS in France, a leading provider of satellite services for environmental and maritime applications.
“The two-way link with the satellite is the key,” says ESA’s Peter de Maagt, who was also on the expedition.
“The increased efficiency has had knock-on benefits that have opened up new opportunities for better, less invasive tracking.
“This makes it easier to monitor how wildlife is coping in our fast-changing environment.”
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Read More »The Rise of SeaTech: An Internet of Fish
June 19th, 2019
Via GreenBiz, a look at the rise of SeaTech:
Someday we’ll have an Internet of Fish. Underwater sensors, robots and cameras will reveal sea creatures to catch and avoid, changing ocean conditions and goings-on in farmed fish pens — all at the tap of an app. Someday we won’t stare at the seafood counter wondering if a “halibut” is really a halibut and where it came from. Someday methane-eating bacteria will clean the atmosphere and produce fish feed ingredients in the process.
That day is on the horizon — and you don’t even have to squint.
The information technology and biotech revolutions were slow to reach the over $390 billion global seafood industry, but now they are surging in to join an upwelling of technological innovation within the industry, from land-based fish farming to deep-sea fishing. Seatech, with its potential to address urgent needs such as climate change adaptation, supply chain transparency and sustainable fishing and aquaculture, promises to be at least as big an opportunity as the agtech wave that preceded it.
The Internet of Fish comes together
It’s been clear for a while that an Internet of Fish could bring all kinds of benefits, including better fisheries management, more productive and lower-waste fishing and traceable fish consumers can feel good about. But only recently has connecting all the elements of seafood’s supply chain — under the water, on the water and on shore — emerged as a realistic goal. Just 10 years ago, underwater cameras were super expensive, and refining other electronics for underwater operation wasn’t a priority. Now rafts of submersible robots, cameras and sensors are sending critical data to phones and computers on boats and on land, allowing real-time decision making.
The robots patrol open-ocean fish farms (PDF), recording the health, size and feeding habits of fish within the net pens, along with environmental conditions. They can even fix frayed nets and remove waste. Cameras in net pens and onshore aquaculture tanks keep an electronic eye out for potential problems so farmers can take preventive steps, while cameras on fishing gear let fishers see what’s in the water before they drop their nets. That helps them avoid bycatch and keep fisheries open.
Tools that gather big data from wide swaths of the ocean can make targeted fishing even more effective. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s EcoCast tool, for example, draws on-location reports and satellite measurements of ocean conditions to show West Coast fishers where they are most likely to find swordfish and least likely to snag turtles and other threatened species. The key is making the data available in real time so that fishing boats can use it on the water.
Fish farmers are also benefiting from new data-sharing tools. NOAA’s National AquaMapper collects over 100 aquaculture-relevant geospatial data types in a web-based tool for exploring, siting and permitting offshore aquaculture operations. The tool can spare farmers months of back-and-forth paperwork with multiple agencies.
Putting the ‘see’ in seafood’s supply chain
Storied seafood has been on the industry’s menu for some time. Forward thinkers realize people who care about how their coffee got to their cup also want to know how their seafood ended up on their plate. Consumer-facing companies that work directly with fishers and farmers already can tell that story, but they’re a tiny portion of the market. For the industry at large, seeing through seafood’s more typically long, murky supply chains has been a challenge.
A whole suite of traceability and transparency technologies (PDF) is poised to change that. Companies developing these tools are small-scale at this point, but the sheer number and diversity of technologies popping up shows it is possible for seafood buyers to track where a fish was caught, the dock it was hauled up on, the temperature it’s been kept at and other meaningful data. ThisFish(a former Fish 2.0 finalist), for example, traces seafood on its journey from water to table using software that lets each handler in the chain upload information on each coded fish. The system operates in Canada’s east and west coast fisheries.
Portugal-based Bitcliq (another Fish 2.0 alumnus) is using a blockchain platform to trace fish from catch to dock. It’s also connecting fishing fleets with retail buyers, enabling on-the-spot purchases. Blockchain proponents think the shared digital ledger, which shows a cryptographically protected, time-stamped history of data uploads and transactions, has the potential to transform seafood supply chains worldwide. In addition to providing traceability, blockchain technology could make seafood trade financing viable: With reliable supply chain information and a range of blockchain solutions available, financial institutions could build better predictive models and develop finance and insurance products matched to the seafood industry’s real risks and needs.
Hooking up automated data capture solutions incorporated in packaging to Internet of Fish data coming from the water will be central to advancing blockchain adoption and other traceability solutions. Data capture by sensors, robots, computer vision and IoT systems overrides the problem of human error (or intentional fraud) in supply chain reporting, and expands the types of data available. In the aquaculture industry, big companies such as Amazon and Cargill are already starting to digitalize the salmon feed supply chain to trace feed sources.
The convergence of traceability and transparency technologies will open a path to real progress on issues such as mislabeling, illegal fishing and labor violations by revealing a full picture of seafood’s fragmented supply chain. The links — small fishing boats and farms, an array of middlemen, international retailers — still will be there, but they’ll be easy to find and connect. As with the web after Google, suddenly we’ll have everything at our fingertips.
Let them eat flies — and bacterial proteins and algae
Better fisheries management and supply chain transparency can only do so much. Aquaculture could relieve the pressure on wild fish stocks while providing good, clean protein to a world increasingly hungry for it — but only if we stop feeding farmed fish with wild forage fish. Advances in biotech could provide the answer here.
Biotech startups focused on algae, bacteria-powered waste solutions and insect proteins target the fish feed market (PDF) because it’s where low-volume production of new nutrients has the highest payoff and market demand. Oil from microalgae is an excellent, scalable fish oil alternative that delivers better animal health and growth rates than vegetable feeds, as well as better tasting, more nutritious fish.
And companies that feed methane, carbon and other industrial byproducts to bacteria in fermentation tanks are pulling out high-quality proteins that rival those in the best fish meals. Black soldier flies and other fast-growing insects that eat food waste also could be an excellent protein source for fish feeds.
Collaboration, not competition, is powering seatech’s rise
Big picture: All these technologies are potentially game-changing innovations for oceans and the seafood sector. But counter to the narrative of cutthroat competition that clings to tech generally, seatech likely will succeed only through combination and collaboration. The market is huge and these are not standalone solutions — they’re specialized pieces of a vast global whole where solutions were needed yesterday.
Growing companies are changing their priorities in recognition of this fact. More than half the companies coming into the Fish 2.0 network seek partnerships alongside investment. We started Fish 2.0 as a competition, but we’ve seen that growth in the sector depends on collaboration. Seatech’s success will lie in solving this equation: the right product plus the right business model plus the right partnerships. The result will be strong returns plus deep positive impact — and that’s a someday we can truly look forward to.
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Read More »NASA Tracks Globe’s Changing Water
June 13th, 2019
Via Terra Daily, a look at the use of satellites to track changes in the world’s water:
Water is so commonplace that we often take it for granted. But too much – or too little of it – makes NASA explores our changing freshwater worlds.
Catastrophic flooding in the U.S. Midwest this spring has caused billions of dollars in damage and wreaked havoc with crops, after rain tipped off a mass melting of snow. Seven years of California drought so debilitating that it led to water rationing came to a close after a wet and snowy winter capped off several years of slow rebound and replenished the vital mountain snowpack.
Half a world away, drought in eastern Australia so depleted the wheat crop that it had to be imported for the first time in 12 years. In eastern Africa and the Middle East, some of the most severe drought conditions on Earth are contributing to stressed crops across Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.
Whether concerned with floods, droughts, or the status and quality of water supplies, addressing the water-related needs of humans on Earth starts with knowing where the water is. With unique views from space, NASA is at the forefront of studying and monitoring this most precious resource that is constantly on the move.
Researchers use data from satellites, aircraft, and other efforts, to find out where and when water is available around the globe, how much, and how are those patterns changing. They then figure out how to best use that data and get it into the hands of the people who need it most.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring areas of NASA research into Earth’s freshwater and surveying how those advances help people solve real world problems.
NASA and its partners are using satellites to revolutionize our ability to track and understand the flow of freshwater around Earth – whether it is in the atmosphere, at the Earth’s surface, or underground. In the last two decades, freely available NASA datasets have been used for extensive research into the movement, distribution, and interaction of each part of the water cycle worldwide.
It’s a complex cycle: Evaporating from warm tropical oceans, freshwater condenses into clouds, circulating on the winds where a portion of it falls as rain or snow. On the ground, freshwater is stored in ice, snow, rivers and lakes. Or, it soaks into the ground, disappearing from view to infiltrate into soils and aquifers. Or, before it disappears from view, it can evaporate back to the atmosphere, where moisture is tightly related to Earth’s energy flow, which in turn influences weather patterns that govern freshwater’s distribution.
“Fresh water is critically important to humans, both in obvious ways and in unseen ways such as moving heat around Earth’s entire climate system,” said Jared Entin, terrestrial hydrology program manager in the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters, Washington. “With our current satellites, we are now making great progress in pinning down both the detail needed for local water decisions and the global view essential to better understanding our changing climate.”
Researchers funded by NASA have used satellite and airborne data to better inform existing tools for flooding, drought forecasts and famine relief efforts, and for planning and monitoring regional water supplies. These efforts are tackling some of the most pressing needs of people around the world.
These efforts are shaped by local geography and specific user needs to ensure they address freshwater data that are most valuable to communities. For this reason, NASA supports a number of water-management applications that are customized to support different regions. For example, NASA’s Western Water Applications Office works with various entities in the western U.S., including state governments, tribal nations, and private industries to track the impacts of drought on agriculture and general water supplies.
Abroad, NASA partners with the U.S. Agency for International Development through the SERVIR program to provide satellite data, computing tools, and training to local partners that improve local flood forecasting in Africa and assess climate impacts on mountain snow packs in the Himalayas, among other efforts.
These programs are but a few examples of many NASA-supported projects. Hundreds of other researchers, government agencies, and non-profits develop their own water-management tools and applications using NASA’s free and open datasets.
Water from Snow
NASA is improving on existing and developing new remote sensing methods that can reveal how much water is stored in mountain and seasonal snowpack – one of the world’s most vital sources of freshwater. More than a billion people, spanning multiple continents, rely on water from mountain snow for their water supplies that support drinking water, farming, and even hydroelectric power.Snowfall patterns shift over time, however, both year-to-year from natural variability and due to long-term climate effects. With persistent human demands, the ability to accurately measure how much water is in mountain snowpack becomes an even more critical capability.
Through the Airborne Snow Observatory program, NASA and California’s Department of Water Resources use instruments mounted on airplanes to create high resolution estimates of snow water content for priority watersheds in the Western U.S. The collected data helps determine the timing of the spring melt, which has downstream effects on hydroelectric power generation and planning for how much water can be held in reservoirs.
NASA is also focused on the long-term development of tools to measure water in snow through an airborne field campaign called SnowEx. This type of field campaign connects detailed measurements of snow in the Colorado Rocky Mountains taken by researchers on the ground to remote sensing observations made by aircraft flying over the ground sites. The connections made from these highly detailed datasets will help scientists design future satellite missions that will make similar measurements from space.
Airborne snow measurements, as well as other programs, complement long-term regional observations from NASA satellites that create estimates for entire mountain ranges in the Western U.S. and around the world.
Water in the Sky
When we think of water on Earth we may think of the ocean, rivers and lakes. But as water cycles around the planet, the atmosphere holds moisture, creating a reservoir in the sky that periodically condenses into rain and snow.NASA is part of a team from more than a dozen countries whose satellites are working together to deliver global rainfall data every half hour. Over land, rain has immediate impact as it soaks into the ground, which supports crops.
Rainfall data is one of the most essentia toolsl for monitoring freshwater’s movement around the planet, and goes into applications that touch people’s everyday lives, including weather forecasting, crop monitoring, and flood prediction.
For many parts of the world, especially developing countries and hard-to-reach terrain where ground measurements are sparse to non-existent, these global NASA datasets are sometimes the only consistent source of information on rainfall and soil moisture.
Water from Below
NASA satellites monitoring Earth’s gravity field have given scientists insight into the movement of large masses such as ice and water – including water hidden underground. This global look at changes to the amount of water storied in aquifers, massive underground freshwater reservoirs, has revealed some concerning trends. Of the 37 largest aquifers on Earth, a third of them are being depleted by communities pumping the water faster than it recharges from rainfall.These water declines occur primarily where agriculture and aquifers coincide, and where human water demands can easily exacerbate conditions of periodic drought. Among those most stressed in the past decade are the Central Valley of California, the Indus Basin in northwestern India and Pakistan, and the Arabian Aquifer System in Saudi Arabia.
About 70% of all freshwater on Earth is used for irrigated agriculture. Underground aquifers are water sources that act like waiting bank savings accounts, providing a dependable supply and making agriculture possible in arid areas where significant rain events may only occur once a year and during droughts when surface water is scarce.
We do not know the full extent of these underground water aquifers or when they may run dry, but understanding the change in available water that occurs both seasonally and throughout the satellite record helps decision-makers manage their resources.
In addition to witnessing the effects of agriculture, the satellite data show the effects of climate change, most notably in the decline of sea ice and ice sheets at the poles. They also observe the ups and downs of more natural variability that reflects a region’s span of wet or dry years.
As the global satellite record extends into the future, researchers and water managers will continue to monitor freshwater hidden below as climate patterns shift and human demands grow.
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Read More »Satellite Data + AI = No Place For Polluters To Hide
May 27th, 2019
Via Vox, an interesting look at the use of satellite imagery to precisely track the air pollution (including carbon emissions) coming out of every single power plant in the world:
Earlier this month brought a mind-blowing announcement in the world of power plants and pollution.
In a nutshell: A nonprofit artificial intelligence firm called WattTime is going to use satellite imagery to precisely track the air pollution (including carbon emissions) coming out of every single power plant in the world, in real time. And it’s going to make the data public.
This is a very big deal. Poor monitoring and gaming of emissions data have made it difficult to enforce pollution restrictions on power plants. This system promises to effectively eliminate poor monitoring and gaming of emissions data.
And it won’t just be regulators and politicians who see this data; it will be the public too. When it comes to environmental enforcement, the public can be more terrifying and punitive than any regulator. If any citizen group in the world can go online and pull up a list of the dirtiest power plants in their area, it eliminates one of the great informational barriers to citizen action.
And citizens have reason to organize. According to the latest State of Global Air report, air pollution is the fifth greatest global mortality risk. It causes 5 million early deaths and 147 million years of healthy life lost, every year, and the countries building the most power plants are experiencing the most air pollution. Their citizens have the most on the line. And now they’ll be armed with information.
Things are about to get interesting. Let’s look at the details.
Eyes in the sky will track all power plant pollution
The plan is to use data from satellites that make theirs publicly available (like the European Union’s Copernicus network and the US Landsat network), as well as data from a few private companies that charge for their data (like Digital Globe). The data will come from a variety of sensors operating at different wavelengths, including thermal infrared that can detect heat.
The images will be processed by various algorithms to detect signs of emissions. It has already been demonstrated that a great deal of pollution can be tracked simply through identifying visible smoke. WattTime says it can also use infrared imaging to identify heat from smokestack plumes or cooling-water discharge. Sensors that can directly track NO2 emissions are in development, according to WattTime executive director Gavin McCormick.
Between visible smoke, heat, and NO2, WattTime will be able to derive exact, real-time emissions information, including information on carbon emissions, for every power plant in the world. (McCormick says the data may also be used to derive information about water pollutants like nitrates or mercury.)
Who’s behind it
Google.org, Google’s philanthropic wing, is getting the project off the ground (pardon the pun) with a $1.7 million grant; it was selected through the Google AI Impact Challenge.
WattTime, a nonprofit that is now a subsidiary of the Rocky Mountain Institute, made a splash earlier this year with Automated Emissions Reduction. AER is a program that uses real-time grid data and machine learning to determine exactly when the grid is producing the cleanest electricity. It can then automatically adjust power consumption to match up with those times, ensuring that users take advantage of the lowest-carbon power available. (Many kinds of power consumption can be safely shifted in time, like water heaters, battery charging, and some industrial processes; they are “dispatchable.”) AER is, as the name indicates, entirely automated; it works behind the scenes, without any user intervention.
WattTime is partnering with Carbon Tracker, a think tank that’s done previous work with satellite imagery, using it for financial analysis of power plants (including a pioneering studyshowing that 42 percent of global coal power plants are operating at a loss), and the World Resources Institute, which operates the world’s most comprehensive Global Database of Power Plants.
WattTime is a mission-based nonprofit with a track record, legitimate partners, and serious financial backing. Despite its diminutive size, it has a chance of becoming the global clearinghouse for transparent, reliable pollution data.
What it will immediately enable
This information is going to empower all kinds of tools and avenues for pollution reduction. Here are a few McCormick mentioned to me:
- Every pollution law or international agreement relies on monitoring and verification. Many countries, or areas within countries, are suspected of underreporting emissions. It creates a background level of mutual mistrust. Now there will be a trusted, third-party source of verified information on every power plant; no more gaming the system by fiddling with local monitoring equipment or misreporting emissions. Transparent third-party verification will raise everyone’s confidence in the ability of regulators and negotiators to produce results.
- Remember Automated Emission Reductions? Real-time pollution data will enable AER to work anywhere in the world, without undue reliance on state or industry sources of data. I’ve written before about how battery storage doesn’t always reduce carbon emissionson the grid, because it’s rarely timed to sync up with clean energy. California is trying to fix that problem. AER will make it easier, for California and everyone else, to match clean energy production and consumption.
- Real-time, public pollution data will help renewable energy developers site their projects in areas where they can maximize emission reductions.
- Carbon Tracker has already shown that satellite data can be used for more precise financial analysis of power plants (again: 42 percent of the coal plants in the world are operating at a loss). WattTime’s program will make that analysis more robust and help better identify those areas where renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil power.
- Finally, the data will help fill in the gaps even in US pollution monitoring, which are many.
All that stuff will crank up the minute the information becomes public. WattTime is currently gathering data and working with partners who will put the information to use.
But the really interesting stuff will happen after this data is unleashed on the world and becomes accessible everywhere.
What it could enable in the long term
To help illuminate the larger impact this information might have, indulge me in a brief anecdote.
In 1986, the US created the Toxic Release Inventory, a database tracking the toxic emissions of all US industrial facilities.
It was strengthened in 1990, as part of the Pollution Prevention Act. At the time, this outcome was seen as something of a failure — the originally proposed bill contained stiff penalties for toxic emissions, but they were stripped out in negotiations. In the end, all that was left was the information, the TRI itself.
But the TRI has gone on to prove one of the most effective environmental regulations in US history. Simply making the information available to the public empowered citizens, nonprofits, and state governments to organize pressure on the worst emitters. In the five years after it was implemented, toxic emissions fell by almost half.
The TRI enabled what scholars Archon Fung and Dara O’Rourke (of Harvard and MIT, respectively) have called ‘‘populist maximin regulation,” which differs from conventional command-and-control regulation in four ways. First, the role of government agencies “is not to set and enforce standards, but to establish an information-rich context for private citizens, interest groups, and firms to solve environmental problems.”
Second, standards are not set according to expert risk analysis, but according to what the public is willing to accept. Third, emitters “adopt pollution prevention and abatement measures in response to a dynamic range of public pressures rather than to formalized agency standards or governmental sanction.” Finally, the information allows public attention to focus on the worst emitters — maximum attention on minimum performers, thus “maximin.”
A shorter way of putting this: Once the public knows what polluters are up to, it stops letting them get away with it.
Just as the TRI enabled populist maximin regulation in the US — a wave of bottom-up activism that the authors of the TRI never anticipated — so could WattTime’s data be used to organize citizen pressure on the biggest carbon emitters, on a global scale.
If nothing else, the biggest polluters, and the biggest cheaters, will be exposed. No company, no country, will be able to hide or fudge its numbers. The public will know how to find them.
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Read More »Space Technology Predicts Droughts Several Months In Advance
January 28th, 2019
Via EurekAlert, an interesting article on
Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) have used new space technology to predict droughts and increased bushfire risk up to five months in advance.
ANU researcher Siyuan Tian said the team knew they needed to move into space to get closer to understanding the complex nature of drought.
They used data from multiple satellites to measure water below the Earth’s surface with unprecedented precision, and were able to relate this to drought impacts on the vegetation several months later.
“The way these satellites measure the presence of water on Earth is mind boggling,” said Ms Tian from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.
“We’ve been able to use them to detect variations in water availability that affect the growth and condition of grazing land, dryland crops and forests, and that can lead to increased fire risk and farming problems several months down the track.”
Co-researcher Professor Albert van Dijk said combining these data with a computer model simulating the water cycle and plant growth enabled the team to build a detailed picture of the water’s distribution below the surface and likely impacts on the vegetation months later.
“We have always looked up at the sky to predict droughts – but not with too much success,” said Professor van Dijk from the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society.
“This new approach – by looking down from space and underground – opens up possibilities to prepare for drought with greater certainty. It will increase the amount of time available to manage the dire impacts of drought, such as bushfires and livestock losses.”
The drought forecasts will be combined with the latest satellite maps of vegetation flammability from the Australian Flammability Monitoring System at ANU to predict how the risk of uncontrollable bushfires will change over the coming months.
The team used the GRACE Follow-On satellites, which were developed by American, German and Australian scientists. ANU Professor Daniel Shaddock led the Australian team.
Dr Paul Tregoning from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences said the GRACE space gravity mission provided a measurement of changes in total water storage anywhere on Earth for the first time.
“Combined with measurements of surface water and top soil moisture from other satellites, this provides the ability to know how much water is available at different depths below the soil,” he said.
“What is innovative and exciting about our work is that we have been able to quantify the available water more accurately than ever before. This leads to more accurate forecasts of vegetation state, as much as five months in advance.”
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