Saving Earth from space: satellites and sustainability

October 2022  |  FEATURE | BOARDROOM INTELLIGENCE

Financier Worldwide Magazine

October 2022 Issue

Risks posed by environmental change and an urgent need to seize opportunities in a transition to sustainability rank among humanity’s most pressing problems – issues that are global in scope and unprecedented in scale.

These problems, according to Future Earth, include: (i) feeding 9 billion people within sustainable planetary boundaries; (ii) valuing and protecting nature’s services and biodiversity; (iii) adapting to a warmer and more urban world; (iv) transitioning to low carbon societies; (v) providing income and fostering innovation around sustainable systems; (vi) reducing disaster risks; and (vii) aligning governance with stewardship.

In a business context, regulatory efforts to control and reduce environmental impacts form the involuntary requirement that covers many businesses. But there are companies that make voluntary commitments toward reducing their environmental impact, mostly by reducing their net carbon emissions.

“To make a real impact, commitments need to move beyond lip service,” says Shashin Mishra, vice president of EMEA at AiDash. “Many companies have made commitments because it looks good for customers, regulators and investors, not because it makes a real environmental impact. Most voluntary efforts today are limited to measuring just Scope 1 and 2 emissions and offsetting them by simply buying carbon credits.

“This is a problem because it is really Scope 3 emissions which account for up to 80 percent of emissions from most businesses,” he continues. “Another problem with buying carbon credits is that emissions are being generated in one part of the world, while the offset programmes are being run halfway around the world.”

Voluntary commitment or not, measuring the progress of sustainability efforts is a key challenge, with current techniques largely based on guesswork. However, the science and technology does exist – via satellite data and artificial intelligence (AI) – to help businesses baseline and measure the most critical metrics and monitor progress.

Moreover, investment in satellite technologies can help businesses to establish their starting point and work toward their sustainability goals, improving outcomes and offering transparency on their work.

Sustainable outcomes

According to the Stanford University paper ‘Using Satellite Imagery to Understand and Promote Sustainable Development’, AI-powered tools can help extract and assess important information from satellite imagery, such as agricultural productivity, urban population density and rural economic activity, making them a valuable addition to the sustainable development toolkit.

The paper contends that satellite imagery, which is rapidly becoming more available at higher resolutions, offers a potential solution to data scarcity and unreliability. As part of its analysis, Stanford researchers compared the availability and frequency of imagery from 200 random sample sites – 100 in the US and the European Union (EU) and 100 in Africa between 2010 and 2019 – finding a substantial increase in both high and moderate-to-low resolution captures over the past decade.

Today, sites that were once imaged a couple of times a year are now being captured multiple times a week. The quality of these images, even at a moderate resolution, captures highly localised human activity, including infrastructure growth and productivity, as well as the broader health and sustainability of communities and the planet.

“Satellite imaging combined with AI enables us to analyse 100 percent of an area regardless of its size, at a speed not possible using manual methods, and with accuracy that is as good or better than human levels,” adds Mr Mishra. “Manual measurements are slow and flying planes or helicopters exacerbates the problem by increasing CO2 emissions, whereas with satellite imaging, measurements can be made as frequently as needed. For example, flying a helicopter to get images for a 150-mile transmission line generates over one tonne of CO2. And using satellites to do the same job has a carbon footprint of less than 75 grams.”

Despite the unprecedented access to imagery offered by satellites, however, many questions remain – in particular, a need to better understand how well AI models can map satellite image inputs toward sustainable development outcomes, as well what may limit the models’ performance.

Sustainability goals

For many companies, the use of AI models to process satellite data to measure emissions and identify impactful environmental enhancements is key to achieving their environmental and sustainability goals – an ambitious task given the United Nation’s (UN’s) mandate that emissions be reduced by 45 percent by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

“Voluntary carbon markets need to grow 15 times between 2021 and 2030 in order to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius targets that were defined in the Paris Agreement,” asserts Mr Mishra. “And carbon offsetting efforts need to match the demand for credits and will require the use of technology to deliver at the necessary scale.

“With satellite imaging and AI, we can now measure both carbon and biodiversity at scale,” he adds.

So, with the 2030 deadline set by climate scientists to stop – and hopefully reverse – climate change just eight years away, businesses will continue to look to revolutionary new technologies to help them achieve their targets, with satellite technology among the arsenal of weapons to tackle climate change and save the Earth before it is too late.

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Fraser Tennant