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By Robert Bell, Executive Director, SSPI and WTA. In 1988, a meeting of the World Health Assembly set a mind-boggling goal: to eradicate the ancient scourge of polio.

At the time the goal was set, the polio virus was endemic in 125 countries and about 350,000 people, mostly children, were paralyzed by polio each year.

This was an audacious goal; however, 24 years later, the number of polio cases worldwide had fallen by more than 99 percent, saving more than 10 million children from paralysis.

How To End A Plague

The near-eradication of polio required big public investment in vaccine. Polio is highly infectious, and entire villages and districts had to be vaccinated to stop the chain of transmission.

Stamping polio out meant recruiting and training hundreds of thousands of vaccinators and sending them into the field with millions of doses of vaccine, which had to be kept cold in foam-plastic boxes. The goal was to vaccinate every child in the country several times, with a month or so between each round.

This was an unprecedented effort that allowed India to declare itself polio-free in February of 2012. India was long considered one of the most unlikely places to eradicate polio because of that nation’s high population density, high rates of migration, poor sanitation, and low rates of route immunization. Data-driven planning, well-trained and motivated staff, rigorous monitoring and political will at all levels, that made the difference.

As did satellite technology… according to Bill Gates, whose Gates Foundation is funding the battle against polio in nations around the world, satellite imagery and mobile phones equipped with GPS are instrumental in the fight.

India is now sharing their best practices with Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan—countries where polio remains endemic—and the Nigerian experience reveals just how technology can help a person-to-person effort achieve national scale.

Satellite Maps & Cell Phones
Mr. Gates outlined the basics in a 2012 interview with author Rick Smolan.

“The Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) creates these incredibly detailed satellite maps for governments,” he said. “They found that there were villages in Nigeria, which has the highest rate of polio resurgence in the world, that have never shown up on any map. No one in the government knew they were there. ESRI can recognize the shape of huts and pathways. They updated the satellite maps and handed out 10,000 GPS-enabled cell phones to polio workers. They could see where the workers were in real-time, and make sure they got to each of the houses.”

Satellite technologies feed into many steps in the process. Space-based imaging is used to update geographical information systems (GIS) that generate maps for the field workers.

Using GIS as a tool, supervisors plan how to deploy their teams in order to cover every village and settlement. Each morning, the teams receive their GPS-equipped phones and start their visits. In the villages, with the help of local guides, they visit health facilities, schools, markets and mosques, where they vaccinate both children and adults.

At the end of the day, the phones are collected for charging, which lets supervisors download their tracking data and match that information to the GIS system. The results are tracks showing where every vaccinator has been, as well as updated map coordinates for important buildings. Every few days, the teams receive summaries of missed or partially-covered settlements that need a return visit.

Winning The Final Prize
As impressive as this effort has been, the battle is not yet won. The 2012 World Health Assembly declared that the complete eradication of polio was “an emergency for global public health.” That is because the disease is making a comeback in nations where civil unrest and war are making it impossible for vaccination programs to function.

This is a battle worth fighting—in addition to the relief of human suffering, experts believe that eradicating polio will generate US$40 to $50 billion in benefits, with most of that money going to low-income countries. Winning that prize is a cause to which the satellite business is proud to contribute.

“The Final Battle to End Polio” is part of SSPI’s Better Satellite World campaign, which educates end-users, policymakers and the next generation on the indispensable contributions of satellite to our world.

More stories and videos are available at www.bettersatelliteworld.com.
www.sspi.org/

Sources
Polio: Strategy Overview, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2012. The Human Face of Big Data, by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, Against All Odds Productions, November 2012.
“Use of GPS Tracking of Vaccination Team Activities in Polio NIDs in Nigeria,” by Dr. M.Z. Mahmud, project presentation.

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Broadly, the AWS Cloud Credits for Research Program supports researchers who seek to:

  • Build cloud-hosted publicly available science-as-a-service applications, software, or tools to facilitate their future research and the research of their community.
  • Perform proof of concept or benchmark tests evaluating the efficacy of moving research workloads or open data sets to the cloud.
  • Train a broader community on the usage of cloud for research workloads via workshops or tutorials.

For this specific Call for Proposals, we are looking for applications related to the usage of Earth on AWS datasets.

Application Process

AWS will evaluate academic research support proposals from researchers at accredited institutions throughout the year. Awarded amounts will vary depending on the research proposal and usage requirements documented in the proposal, and will be in the form of credits applicable to AWS services. EC2 usage supported by credits will be for on-demand and Spot Instances only.

Decisions are typically communicated 30 days following submission. Note that decisions are sent from “aws-research-credits [AT] amazon.com” and sometimes get routed to spam.

If you are awarded Research Credits for free usage of AWS, the credits will be good for the earlier of 1 year or until the credits have been fully utilized. Please make sure to account for the duration of the credits in your project timeline, as the end date cannot be extended and credits will expire if unused.

Cloud Credits for Research

For guidance on how to complete this application, please see our FAQ page

An app that uses satellite data to evaluate the quality of wine took home the top prize at this year’s Space App Camp at ESA’s centre in Frascati, Italy.

In its fifth year, the App Camp offers access to the latest space data to app developers, who work to make the information accessible to a broad audience.

As Europe’s Copernicus programme continues to launch the Sentinel satellites, transforming their information into useful products poses both a challenge and an opportunity.

The week-long ‘camp’ culminated today with presentations of the seven projects to a jury, followed by a presentation by ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano.

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(Paris, Washington D.C., Montreal, Yokohama, September 15, 2016) – According to the 9th edition of Euroconsult’s report, Satellite-Based Earth Observation, Market Prospects to 2025, due to be published in the coming weeks, 163 satellites (>50kg) were launched for civil and commercial Earth observation (excluding meteorology) over 2006-2015. These were launched for entities in 35 countries and generated $18.4 billion in manufacturing market revenues. Most of these satellites were launched by government operators to support policy objectives spanning climate change, sustainable development and industrial support. In addition, EO remains the primary application for emerging space programs; growing funding into these programs is a key driver for overall investment growth. In 2015 civil government investment topped $10 billion for the first time.


“The EO industry is going through a significant supply increase. Over the next decade, 419 satellites are expected to be launched generating $35.5 billion in manufacturing revenues,” said Adam Keith, Managing Director of Euroconsult Canada and editor of the report. “Significant growth in the the number of commercial satellites launched in constellation is expected. When the number of satellites <50kg (such as the Planet and Spire constellations) are added, the number of supply solutions expands even further. As supply will increase faster than the demand for commercial data and services, some price pressure is expected to result. As well, operators will need to better differentiate themselves in the marketplace as to the capabilities of their respective systems.”

The commercial data market totaled $1.7 billion in 2015 and is anticipated to total $3 billion in 2025. Ongoing economic unrest in key Latin America countries and Russia, as well as lower oil and gas prices, are having an impact, as does anticipated price reductions for $/km2 of EO data. Nevertheless, the industry continues to develop positively. In the short term, growth is expected to continue to be driven by defense, with ongoing regional unrest and the limited ability of countries to operate capable image intelligence systems being the main driving factors. Further applications such as in the maritime, infrastructure and resources monitoring sectors are expected to support growth in the longer term.

The value-added services market reached $3.2 billion in 2015, and is growing at a faster rate than the data market alone (11% 5-year CAGR). Key markets for value-adding services do not mirror those for commercial data sales. Defense, while representing 61% of the commercial data market, represents only 15% of the VAS market; conversely, infrastructure projects (such as cartography, cadaster, etc.) are only 10% of the commercial data market, but 33% of the value-added market. The reasoning for this is relatively straightforward; defense end-users purchase data with much value-added analytics performed in-house. On the other hand, lower-cost, coarser resolution and geolocation accuracy data can be leveraged with value-adding to form higher value products and services. This approach is expected in emerging location-based applications – the focus of upcoming satellite constellations. While the data may be lower-cost, it will be able to build applications based on high frequency change detection with the focus on the product or service delivery over purely data sales.

About the Report
Satellite-Based Earth Observation, Market Prospects to 2025 is the only report providing industry forecasts, assessment of business opportunities and analysis of the entire value chain for this growing segment of the satellite industry. The report includes a detailed breakdown of application sectors within each region along with consolidated forecasts per application sector and per region.

About Euroconsult
Euroconsult is the leading global consulting firm specializing in space markets. As a privately-owned, fully independent firm, we provide first-class strategic consulting, develop comprehensive research and organize executive-level annual summits for the industry. With 30 years of experience, Euroconsult is trusted by 600 clients in over 50 countries. Euroconsult is headquartered in France, with offices in the U.S., Canada and Japan.

PRESS CONTACT
Andrew Smith
+1 (514) 903-1001
smith@euroconsult-na.com
www.euroconsult-ec.com

(13 September 2016) ESA and Enterprise Estonia have signed an arrangement that gives one of ESA’s newest Member States access to data from the Copernicus Sentinel satellites.

With four Copernicus satellites – Sentinel-1A, Sentinel-1B, Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-3A – now in orbit, a wealth of complementary imagery and data is being delivered for the Copernicus services.

Led by the EC, the Copernicus programme was put in place to manage the environment and respond to the challenges of a changing world.

As part of the programme, ESA is responsible for the ‘space component’, which not only includes the Sentinel satellites, but also the network of receiving stations and processing centres through which data are made available for the range of Copernicus services.

Estonia is a new ESA Member State, formally joining the Agency in September 2015.

While data from the Sentinel satellites and missions contributing to the Copernicus programme are freely accessible for the Copernicus services, as well as to scientific and other users, the Collaborative Ground Segment Agreement signed today will facilitate Sentinel data exploitation in Estonia.
Estonia signs up for Sentinel data

The agreement was signed by Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, and Madis Võõras, Head of the Space Office Enterprise Estonia.

It not only guarantees that Estonia has access to data, but also ensures that ESA provides technical advice on setting up data acquisition and dissemination, and makes data processing and archiving software available to national initiatives.

Josef Aschbacher said, “We are thrilled to welcome Estonia to our expanding collaborative agreement and this is another important step for Copernicus.

“We are looking forward to seeing the benefits this will bring to a country that is already strong in Earth observation science, applications and data processing.”

Madis Võõras added, “Today marks an important milestone for Estonia. We have many areas of interest, such as agriculture, forestry and maritime surveillance, to name but a few, which will greatly benefit from this cooperation.”

Estonia is the 12th state to sign the agreement following Greece, Norway, Italy, Finland, Germany, France, UK, Sweden and Canada.

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(Munich, 15/09/16) MARSAT consortium announced it is ready to provide innovative space-based applications using satellite-derived information for the maritime and coastal industry. MARSAT’s main goal is to create integrated satellite-based services to improve safety and efficiency in shipping, offshore industries, emergency response and rescue operations.


MARSAT is an ambitious project, which brings together competence of specialists in satellite data provision and analysis, IT and the maritime industry. This team will lay the ground for improved decision making for shipping route optimization, offshore planning and maintenance as well as emergency events”, said Dr. Knut Hartmann, Project Coordinator MARSAT, “EOMAP GmbH & Co KG.

MARSAT is a consortium of six German companies, EOMAP GmbH & Co KG, Drift & Noise Polar Services GmbH, European Space Imaging GmbH, Institute of Shipping Economics and Logistics, SevenCs GmbH, TRENZ AG, and is funded by BMWi, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The kick-off meeting was successfully held at the end of August 2016 at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Space Administration in Bonn, Germany and marked the starting point of this 2.5 year project.

“The use of satellite data and Earth Observation products in the maritime world has an enormous potential. We are at the very beginning, just starting to get a glimpse at the possibilities and huge benefits these innovative technologies will offer.” Dr. Nils Meyer-Larsen, Project Manager, ISL

The technical goals of MARSAT are to create and integrate operational services to allow the maritime industry to take advantage of the most up-to-date satellite information in their day-to-day work. This requires setting up an efficient IT infrastructure to share, integrate and implement satellite-derived data quickly and efficiently from various satellite sources. Services such as ice detection and drift, obstruction and bathymetry mapping will be integrated in maritime information systems so that, e.g., shipping routes can be optimized, up-to date information made available for rescue or emergency events, and base data provided for environmental and coastal use cases within user friendly applications.

“European Space Imaging believes in the potential of the Earth Observation industry to offer integrated, more user-friendly and sustainable services to the maritime industry. By uniting satellite-based information services into existing maritime information structures we will create better services and provide more safety in the industry,” says Adrian Zevenbergen, Managing Director, European Space, Imaging.

MARSAT is a dynamic and steadily growing network of data suppliers, users and academia, and cooperation is more than welcome.

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(Sept 2016) EUMETSAT’s Director-General, Alain Ratier, and Dr. Gerd Gruppe, Director of Space Administration at Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), signed a cooperation agreement for the development of the METimage instrument to be flown on three successive Metop-SG A satellites of the EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation (EPS-SG) in the 2021-2042 timeframe.

The agreement ensures the inclusion of the visible infrared imaging radiometer, METimage, as part of the payload of the Metop-SG A1, A2 and A3 satellites. The METimage advanced radiometer will provide moderate-resolution optical imaging of clouds, aerosols, and surface variables, in 20 spectral channels, benefitting applications such as Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), Nowcasting at high latitudes, Oceanography, Climate monitoring, Hydrology and land monitoring.

Under the agreement, DLR will develop the first METimage flight model and data processing algorithms, procure recurrent instruments on behalf of EUMETSAT and provide support to operations.

EUMETSAT will fund 30% of the development costs for the METimage system and the full costs of recurrent instruments. Also, EUMETSAT will operate the METimage instruments as part of EPS SG throughout its entire lifetime and cover the related costs.

EUMETSAT’s Director-General, Alain Ratier said, “The EPS-SG system requires a suite of advanced imaging and sounding instruments to be, as EPS today, the most important source of satellite observations for numerical weather forecasts. This includes METimage and I am very pleased that we have now secured the development of this essential instrument with the signature of this agreement with DLR”

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Smart mapping leader Esri announced it is engaging students all over the world in a new contest called the Global Content Challenge. With the power of Esri content at their disposal, students will tell their own compelling scientific stories using the Esri Story Map Journal app. Entrants will use personal geographic analyses, visualizations, predictive models, and more, to explore a variety of scientific themes.


“Esri views science as helping us to understand not only how the earth works but also how the earth should look,” said Esri chief scientist Dawn Wright. “Science is the study of how we should look at the earth. GIS places scientific data in a visual context.”

Judges will select the best map journals to be awarded prizes. Esri will share the winning map journals on its Collaborative Resource portal and feature them at Esri’s Federal GIS and Education GIS Conferences as well as Esri Young Professionals Network events.

Esri’s Global Content Challenge is open to undergraduate or graduate students at colleges or universities and to high school students enrolled in an advanced-placement human geography or environmental science course. Esri’s land, ocean, and population categories of premium content libraries will be made available so that entrants can enrich their stories.

Three winners will be awarded their choice of a cash prize or Esri software in each category. The first-place winner will receive $10,000 or software of equivalent value. Second- and third-place prizes are $5,000 and $2,000, respectively, or software of equal value. The competition will open on August 29, 2016, and entries will not be accepted after November 11, 2016, at 5:00 p.m. (PST). Winners will be announced on December 5, 2016.

For more information about Esri’s Global Content Challenge, visit go.esri.com/pr-gcc.

Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, Esri software is used in more than 350,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms.
bq. Visit us at www.esri.com.

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(©WhiteHouse.gov). Even as the United States and the international community act to curb the carbon pollution that is driving climate change, citizens and communities need to prepare for the current and future impacts of a changing climate and work with partners around the world to do the same. That is why, over the last seven and a half years, the Obama Administration has worked to advance the development and provision of data, information, tools, and technical assistance to support climate preparedness and resilience efforts both domestically and internationally.

Today, to continue these efforts, the Administration is launching the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness, a public-private collaboration among Federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, private-sector companies, and civil-society organizations. The partnership will identify priority-information needs, reduce barriers to data access and usability, and develop an open-source platform to enable sharing and learning on the availability and use of data and information for climate resilience. PREP emerged out of the work of the Climate Data Initiative (CDI), when a diverse group of organizations and private companies working with the CDI data decided to focus on the power of collaboration to address gaps they saw in the CDI and enhance access to climate data and information worldwide. It is being pursued in coordination with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data that was launched last year.

To further strengthen global collaboration to enhance access to actionable information for climate resilience, the Administration, along with 13 other nations and organizations from the private sector and civil society, is releasing today a Joint Declaration on Harnessing the Data Revolution for Climate Resilience. The Joint Declaration is being released by the governments of Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, the Marshall Islands, Mexico, Peru, the Republic of Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as by Amazon Web Services, IBM, Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean, Future Earth, the Group on Earth Observations, Google, Microsoft, World Bank, and World Resources Institute. The Joint Declaration calls for concrete actions in order to increase international climate resilience through improving accessibility and usability of data.

PREP and the Joint Declaration respond to the commitments the Administration made as part of its Third Open Government National Action Plan to work to expand the availability and accessibility of climate-relevant data worldwide, leverage open data to stimulate innovation and private-sector entrepreneurship in the application of climate-relevant data, and seek international opportunities to help meet critical data needs.

About the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness

The Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP) seeks to empower a data-driven approach to building climate resilience by:

  • Engaging communities and facilitating ongoing conversations among producers and users of data, information, and tools to support climate resilience;
  • Identifying and reducing the barriers to access, contribute, and use data and information products for climate resilience; and
  • Developing an open-source platform to enhance access to and usability of climate-relevant data and information.

The partnership will be jointly coordinated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and World Resources Institute. It will build on and contribute to the many other programs that the U.S. Government already supports to strengthen climate resilience globally, including the Climate Services for Resilient Development partnership, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) International Research and Applications Project (IRAP), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) SERVIR program, the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP), and the Global Framework for Climate Services

PREP Platform Prototype

Today, PREP is releasing a beta platform as a first step in an iterative process to work with communities around the world to enhance data accessibility to support communities’ climate-resilience needs. The platform was developed on the open-source infrastructure of Resource Watch by a team of science, technology, and climate-resilience specialists from Federal agencies, the private sector, and international-civil-society organizations, working initially with Sonoma County, California; the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington; the city of Porto Alerge, Brazil; and the city of Durban, South Africa.

In the coming year, PREP will enter a pilot phase of the PREP platform using online and offline forums to identify the climate-relevant data and information needs of a wide range of users. The platform, currently in beta form, will allow communities to self-select and visualize an initial set of Federal datasets from climate.data.gov and other relevant data; capabilities to be added over the coming months will include the ability to self-select relevant information into a customizable dashboard. In addition, PREP will seek to work in-depth with at least a dozen communities by the end of 2017 to test the platform and address user needs.

FEDERAL CONTRIBUTIONS

  • U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP): The USGCRP is a Federal program that coordinates and integrates 13 Federal agencies to advance climate science, improve the understanding of how global change is impacting society, and provide the scientific basis to inform and enable timely decisions. In its interagency capacity, USGCRP will coordinate the U.S. Government’s involvement in PREP by providing technical support to the Federal data provision effort, providing administrative support to organize the Federal team, and providing the interface between the Federal and non-Federal teams.
  • Department of the Interior (DOI): DOI will contribute relevant data and services from the Federal Geospatial Platform (GeoPlatform) and facilitate the delivery of Federal information on climate resilience. DOI will also enhance users’ ability to search and use climate data through open-application programing interfaces (APIs) delivered through the GeoPlatform and used by PREP.
  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA): In support of PREP, NASA is developing discovery, access, cataloging, and visualization services on NASA observation and model data and extending curation services for Federal climate-related data, developed through the Climate Data Initiative. NASA will also support the PREP effort by: (1) continuing improvements to services supporting the PREP platform through promoting open standards, application-program interfaces, and persistent data citation; (2) exploring and testing new architectures, such as cloud services, to enhance the flexibility, performance, and extensibility of the PREP platform; (3) coordinating outreach to climate-risk assessment and resilience-planning professionals to better understand their needs from local to global scales; and (4) engaging professionals in the development and testing of the PREP platform and dashboards through sponsored data challenges.
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): The Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Big Data Project is teaming up with selected commercial-cloud and information services providers to distribute NOAA’s data via their platforms and associated analytical services. Both Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Google are currently delivering NOAA information via the Big Data Project and are integrating those NOAA data with data contributions from other U.S. Federal agencies to meet the PREP goals. NOAA will actively engage in PREP data accessibility and public-engagement activities to continue to help decision makers find and use tools and data they most need.

NON-FEDERAL CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS commits to making new datasets available on the AWS Cloud at no cost, including datasets for global elevation, USDA’s National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), and archival Landsat data. AWS will continue to provide cloud services for hosting datasets that PREP identifies as priorities for climate resilience. Additionally, the AWS Cloud Credits for Research program will open a call for proposals this year to develop new tools and applications in support of climate resilience and preparedness activities within PREP. AWS’s activities in PREP will be carried out as part of the new Earth on AWS Consortium, which is made up of enterprises, startups, research institutions, and universities that use AWS to analyze Earth-observation data.
  • CARTO: CARTO’s open-source platform infrastructure powers aspects of the PREP platform’s key data-analysis and visualization capabilities. CARTO commits to continue to work with PREP to facilitate strategic-technology integrations into decision making for climate-risk management. CARTO will also provide in-kind infrastructure and engineering support for the full development of the PREP platform.
  • Descartes Labs: Descartes Labs contributed to the construction of the beta PREP platform and commits to support PREP by: (1) advising on cloud storage, processing, and hosting issues; (2) processing and making available relevant public datasets; and (3) providing relevant Descartes Labs maps of global agriculture and land-use through the PREP platform.
  • Earth Knowledge: Earth Knowledge (EK) worked with Sonoma County to co-design the development of a beta PREP dashboard. Over the next year, EK commits to continue to work with Sonoma County and five additional communities to identify information needs and support the further development of community dashboards. EK will also provide access from the PREP platform to their big-data platform to provide customized data integration, analytics, and business-intelligence software solutions for operational decision making in the areas of global-change impacts to agriculture, water and land management, and health.
  • Esri: Esri actively supported PREP data providers, contributing data-web services and creating a public, open-data site to enable easy discovery, preview, and download of data for analysis. Esri will work with PREP partners to make climate-projection data interactively explorable through open formats and open-source apps. Esri will also make Story Map tools available free to allow anyone to create and share their own data-driven narratives.
  • Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP):ESIP commits to: (1) host workshops to provide a forum for exploring the challenges and opportunities users face using climate-relevant data, especially Earth observations; (2) facilitate a process for documenting the lessons learned and best practices on how to make climate-relevant data more interoperable and useful; and (3) use ESIP infrastructure to incubate proof-of-concept solutions for improving access and evaluating multiple options.
  • Forum One: Over the next year, Forum One will lead an effort, through online collaboration and surveys, to define and document the information and tool needs of communities around the world who are working to manage the risks of climate variability and change.
  • Future Earth: Future Earth will: (1) connect with up to 10 communities around the world to inform co-design of the next phase of the PREP platform so that it meets their needs; (2) connect PREP with well-aligned, international efforts within and beyond Future Earth’s Knowledge Action Networks; and (3) produce a report that characterizes the information and data needs of the communities in order to design the PREP platform to strengthen regional capacities to integrate climate information into existing sustainable-development platforms.
  • Google: Google commits to host climate-relevant data in Google BigQuery and Google Earth Engine, with 1PB of datasets to be hosted for free by the end of 2016. Google further commits to work with PREP to help organize priority, climate-relevant data in the cloud, making the data universally accessible and making it easy to perform small- to large-scale analytics. PREP users will be able to run up to 1TB of queries per month for free without the need to host the data or manage any infrastructure. Researchers, NGOs, and other non-commercial users will also be able to explore and analyze the data in Earth Engine free of charge. Google will also work with other data providers and consumers to develop best practices for data sharing within the climate resilience and preparedness community.
  • Microsoft: Microsoft will work with PREP to help test and demonstrate new tools, services, and business models that enable smart urban infrastructure and environmental management. Microsoft will: (1) convene workshops with a diverse community of participants to identify data gaps, barriers to accessibility and actionable insights, and other challenges; (2) develop cloud-based solutions that support data collection, sharing, and analysis to inform local- and regional-planning efforts for both long-term and short-term resilience decision-making; (3) contribute to research and best practices for data management, access, and security that enable data-driven approaches to build climate resilience; (4) provide cloud-computing resources through the Azure for Research program to help researchers and scientists accelerate projects related to urban resilience and environmental management.
  • Sonoma County, CA: Sonoma County, through the Sonoma County Water Agency and its collaborators, including the North Bay Climate Adaptation Initiative, Regional Climate Protection Authority, and the United States Geological Survey, worked together to co-develop the beta Sonoma County PREP Climate Risk Dashboard. Sonoma County will work with PREP to identify and communicate the information and data access needs of local communities. This includes collaborating with similar international communities in countries such as Colombia.
  • The Group on Earth Observations (GEO): GEO will contribute to the partnership through the efforts of its 100+ member countries and 100+ participating organizations to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). GEO commits to engage providers and users of these data resources through targeted workshops and its annual international plenary to ensure a sustained dialogue around the information needs of those seeking to integrate climate products and services into adaptation processes and decisions. GEO will also support PREP by linking the cross-cutting aspects of climate to several important areas including biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability, disaster resilience, food security and sustainable agriculture, and water resources management.
  • Vizzuality: Vizzuality led the design and development of the underlying infrastructure of the PREP platform. Vizzuality will continue to blend user-focused design with open-source technology to develop the PREP platform from beta to full functionality.
  • The Weather Company, an IBM Business: The Weather Company commits to providing free and open access to relevant data sets, including a new, historical dataset from its Weather Underground personal-weather-station network, providing observations from 200,000+ locations around the globe. In addition, The Weather Company will donate access to data on current conditions and historical observations, which can be analyzed and overlaid with other data to help advance risk assessment and potential planning.
  • World Resources Institute (WRI): WRI will coordinate the non-governmental actions for the partnership. WRI managed the development of the beta PREP platform, which was built on Resource Watch, a collaborative, open-source data system that unites technology, transparency, and human networks to drive sustainable management of the planet’s resources. WRI commits to expanding the partnership, refining the platform based on user feedback, promoting global adoption of the platform, and ensuring the long-term financial sustainability of the platform and the Resource Watch open-data architecture that supports it. WRI will also contribute expertise on resilience and adaptation planning to help communities working with PREP to strengthen their decision making.

©WhiteHouse.gov

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The WB seek to identify and recognize high potential solutions developed by individuals and organizations in these critical areas of sustainable development. These issues are high priorities in service of the World Bank Group’s goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity and are also identified priorities of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.


World Bank Big Data Innovation

Academics, entrepreneurs, innovators, businesses, universities and nonprofits have a larger role to play than ever before in addressing global climate issues through the creation and implementation of solutions. The shift to climate-resilient economies can occur only if the millions of decisions which are made across the globe on a daily basis are taking climate change factors and effects into account. We need your help in identifying and developing big data solutions which can help better understand the impacts of climate change, address its connected issues and positively influence decisions.

Why big data?

In today’s world of mobile technology, social networks, pervasive satellite and sensor information, and machine-to-machine transactions, more data has been generated in the past two years alone in the form of big data than in all of the previous years combined. Data is becoming the lifeblood of many economies, and data-informed decision-making is more important than ever before. However, the ability to use data in development policy and decision-making processes has not seen the same progress. That is where you come in. Help us find solutions and analytical methodologies to use big data effectively so we can help inform climate-sensitive decisions across the globe.

“Recent work from the World Bank Group suggests that poverty eradication is possible even as countries deal with the impacts of climate change and implement policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. … While there are many uncertainties about the impacts of climate change, it is possible to inform decision-making given adequate tools.”
– Stéphane Hallegatte, Senior Economist, World Bank Group Climate Change Unit

Join us as we launch a global call to find big data solutions that address issues pertaining to two critical challenge areas:
1) Food: food security and nutrition 2) Landscapes: forestry and watersheds
 
Who can participate?
This Innovation Challenge is open to individuals, students and entrepreneurs as well as start-ups, university labs, private companies, nonprofits and public sector agencies legally established in member countries of the World Bank Group (see: http://www.worldbank.org/countries).

Applications open

Explore the challenges

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