This essay is the last of a three-part series about the role of the Internet and Internet-based geoprocessing standards in the “opening up” of the geosciences. The first¹essay listed reasons for open publication of geoscience data. The second² described institutional commitment to open data, obstacles to achieving the goal, and technical standards that make the goal practical, and indeed, inevitable. This final essay looks at opportunities for geoscience stakeholders as science evolves in response to the evolution of information technology.

What Earth science “wants”

In his recent book, What Technology Wants³, Kevin Kelly asserts that technology is part of the same mega-phenomenon of emergent order and increasing variety that gave rise to life. After reviewing technology’s history, costs and risks, he says, “Yes, technology is acquiring its own autonomy and will increasingly maximize its own agenda, but this agenda includes — as its foremost consequence — maximizing possibilities for us.”

The institutions and norms of science provide opportunities for scientists in a system of incentives that satisfy their scientific and personal desires well enough to keep science viable in the near term. The institutions and norms, however, are under pressure to evolve. Part of this pressure is the fact that young people entering the geoscience work force relate to information technology in new ways and this technology is advancing at an ever-increasing pace.

Academia and the scientific community both shape and are shaped by media. One hundred years ago, geoscientists did field work, wrote papers on real paper, used mail, and had face-to-face meetings. Research progressed at a fairly methodical pace, often with little interaction between researchers in distance-separated geographic locations. Today, geoscientists use communication tools unthought of 50 years ago, enabling them to very rapidly network and interact with international colleagues and to access massive amounts of information, data and computing power. Such changes have accelerated progress in the Earth sciences and are beginning to open up new opportunities for institutions and individuals. Scientific publishers, for example, have opportunities to curate and publish data, and scientists potentially have more opportunities to be part of teams and communities that let each person make the most of their talents.

Today the Web, which at its root is a set of standards built on top of Internet standards, drives opportunity proliferation: Keyword searches, hyperlinking, tagging, geotagging, social networks, wikis, tweets, portals, web mapping, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, volunteered geographic information and smart phones all present opportunities for scientists. All depend on standards to provide universal access, data sharing and improved communication, and all present both risks and opportunities for institutions. Spawning unwieldy variety, emergent order shakes up old order.

For opportunities in the Earth sciences, what is particularly important are the geospatial standards that support access, sharing and improved communication of data and information referenced to Earth coordinate systems. Every Earth science community can benefit from a common “language” for expressing location, Earth feature properties and semantics, geoprocessing queries and responses, and sensor descriptions and data. New consensus-derived open standards developed by the global membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium⁴ (OGC) provide the foundation. OGC working groups are developing other standards that will address such things as communication of data provenance and quality, linking of information systems for natural and built environments, and location tagging of simple Short Message Service (SMS) messages.

Science wants to create and connect facts to create knowledge, and to connect bits of knowledge to create greater knowledge⁵. These functions depend on communication, so new, more powerful media based on new communication standards help science achieve its goals.

Internet disrupts, institutions resist

In science as in other domains, such as news reporting, the Internet is radically disruptive to old business models and incentive structures. The scientific paper selection and peer review process has become marginally faster with digital communications, but researchers effectively embargo their data both before and after publication. The publication of data is potentially easy and obviously useful (see the two previous articles in this series), so it ought to be the norm, but in practice new structures are needed to deal with rights, attribution, distribution, reputation, responsibilities and payment, and it takes time for such structures to form. To some, it seems that the integrity of science is at risk. To others, it seems that science is moving much too slowly into an era of greater integrity, effectiveness and growth.

With every disruptive technology, something is lost but something is gained (consider Socrates’ disdain for writing). Whether you share Kelly’s techno-optimism or not, the Internet challenge is unavoidable and we must look for answers to the question, “How can the institutions and practices of science be reshaped, not only to keep science viable but also to take science to a new level of integrity and effectiveness in an environment of new and ubiquitous information technologies?” Kelly, who carefully considers neo-Luddite fears and who speaks of our technologies as our children, would be the first to add, “How can we train the new information technologies to better serve science?”

Science co-evolves with society

Three “RSA Animate” animated talks prepared by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) relate to the subject of open science:

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us⁶

The Empathic Civilization⁷

Changing Education Paradigms⁸

Here is my short summary of the talks: Sound behavioral science shows that current mainstream systems of education and worker motivation, which are rooted in outdated worldviews and economic relations, are surprisingly inefficient. What people actually respond to are increased opportunities for autonomy, mastery, purpose and selective collaboration. Most institutions discount these motivations, resulting in a deplorable global waste of human potential. On the positive side with respect to sustainability, each step in the progress of information technology has expanded the social sphere in which empathy motivates and binds us, and thus the hopeful prospect is that the Internet will ultimately extend our feelings of empathy to the biosphere.

With the prospect of active, science-based redesign of motivational systems and ongoing passive “massage” by new media (Marshall McLuhan’s pun⁹), we have some reason to hope that the institutions and practices of science will evolve to offer scientists more opportunities for autonomy, mastery, purpose and selective collaboration. In contrast to old media, which support hierarchical organization and conformity, new media encourage individuation and the emergence of new roles, so we can expect these opportunities to be matched to individuals’ unique motivational profiles. We can reasonably expect growth in creative uses of the Internet to accelerate science, science awareness, and science education.

The details of the new paradigm are, however, unclear. Peer review, for example, is a time-honored tradition in which the peers’ review of data has traditionally been deemed sufficient. How will peer review evolve to accommodate media that make possible much wider examination and reuse of data? The answer is not obvious. Recognizing and acting on new opportunities requires imagination and courage. While the new paradigm may be inevitable, it does not displace the old paradigm except as innovators give it shape.

New roles

The innovators shaping the new paradigm are creating new roles in science.

Part of both Kelly’s story and the RSA’s story is that discovery and invention are almost never the product of a lone genius; instead, each discovery and invention is an inevitable advance that emerges from an environment of ripening conditions. Kelly provides many examples of near-simultaneous completion of essentially identical studies and patents and compares this phenomenon to convergent evolution, the independent appearance in different life forms of, for example, similar wings or eyes. RSA describes the brain science involved in empathy and emulation, which are core elements of collaboration. The speaker in the “Changing Education Paradigms” animation states that most great learning happens in groups.

Thanks to the Web, the “ripening conditions” in any field of investigation evolve more rapidly and are felt more widely than before, and the Web reveals more opportunities for collaboration while also facilitating collaboration. The Web opens up new channels and removes obstacles to information sharing.

Science remains, of course, a highly competitive activity. New modes of partnering and sharing must evolve in an environment in which scientists continue to compete to build professional reputation by publishing findings in prestigious journals, ahead of others doing similar work. Competition will, in fact, probably intensify as innovators turn new media to advantage. This tension will shape the new paradigm. Just as businesses have been finding advantage in “coopetition”, scientists and teams of scientists will find new opportunities for advancement through collaboration. Similarly, life forms compete, but they also depend on each other. Just as maturing ecosystems are characterized by increasing numbers of interdependencies, people pursuing careers in science will create and discover new professional niches. To compete more effectively, scientists will, for example, increasingly seek help in writing grants and papers, developing data models and processing alogrithms, and setting up Web service based processing models. Social networks will help science professionals – not just scientists — join or form teams with unique constellations of creative and practical minds adapted to particular situations.

Cameron Neylon, an open science proponent, offered this sequence of research cycle diagrams in a presentation¹⁰ at a NESTA – Science in Society conference in 2009:

To describe these figures, one might say that open science adds porosity to steps in the research cycle. The outflows of data and information from the steps in one research cycle become inflows to steps in others’ research cycles.

Much of the projected sharing in this more open research process will be, by the nature of the Web, passive and informal, like sharing in open source software development. Lakhani and Hipple found that open source software developers benefit from their free work mainly through the learning gained by browsing through the problems and solutions posed by other developers¹¹.

In the same way that the Web gave rise to phenomena like Facebook and Twitter, such sharing will lead to new roles, new specialization, and new careers and businesses in science. Many Web innovations arise where there is widespread though little recognized need for a new communication channel. In open science, there are already business innovations seeking success in such market niches. For example:

• A small Australian start-up company called Kaggle is exploiting the concept of “crowdsourcing” in a novel way. Kaggle’s core idea is to facilitate the analysis of data by allowing outsiders to model it. To do that, the company organizes competitions in which anyone with a passion for data analysis can battle it out.

• InnoCentive is a website “where organizations—corporations, large and small, not-for-profits and governments—turn when they have important problems that need solving.”¹³

Some new niches appear inside established institutions. The OGC has seen the rise of scientific domain working groups, such as the Hydrology Domain Working Group and the Meteorology and Oceans Domain Working Group, in which scientists and science application specialists focus on application schemas and profiles of OGC standards and best practices for using the standards. Such work elaborates on long-standing data modeling efforts in those disciplines. There are opportunities for such activities in all of the geosciences, because all require in-discipline and inter-discipline semantic interoperability.

While advances such as cloud computing reduce the need for scientists and research programs to spend time and money on systems and systems administration, the growing importance of standards increases the need for people who understand technical, semantic and institutional (cultural and political) interoperability in the context of specific research domains. Likewise, while the transition from file-based data processing to Web service-based data processing reduces the need for scientists to understand and manipulate data formats, the transition to Web-accessible open data and services increases the need for data curators and specialists in topics such as scientific workflow, model interoperability, metadata, data provenance, uncertainty and data rights management.

As geoscientists and GIS professors age they will find themselves increasingly surrounded by younger colleagues who have different titles and who are focused on preparing students to be specialist members of science teams.

Conclusion

In his presentation, Neylon offers these words of advice to those who seek to advance open science: “Make your work available, let others build on it, to increase your impact. Be clear about what you want and expect, and give that information in context. Build your network. It’s your most valuable asset.”

This advice has been applicable since the earliest days of the grand consensus process we call science. The difference is that now there are fewer constraints. New social media enrich our possibilities for networking and discovery. Talent will rise more quickly now, and talented people will more quickly find each other to create outstanding teams. Mentors, collaborators and assistants will be found more easily. Less time and talent will be wasted. Ideas will mature more quickly and will be shared globally.

Because all the geosciences focus on the same Earth, and because our civilization’s survival depends on critical interdisciplinary geosciences such as ecology and climate science, it is geoscientists and their institutional partners who should be paying the most attention to open science. One essential enabler of open science and associated new opportunities in science will be open standards that enable fluid publishing, discovery, assessment, access and use of data, sensors and processing services. The Board, members and staff of the OGC encourage members of the geoscience community to learn more about these standards.

¹ http://www.earthzine.org/2010/08/04/18-reasons-for-open-publication-of-geoscience-data/
² http://www.earthzine.org/2011/02/02/geospatial-standards-opening-up-the-geosciences/
³ “What Technology Wants” Kevin Kelly. Penguin Group. 2010. Page 352.
⁴ http://www.opengeospatial.org
⁵ Kelly p 335
⁶ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel
⁷ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo&feature=channel
⁸ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
⁹ “The Medium is the Massage.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
¹⁰ Cameron Neylon presentation http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/nesta-science-in-society, NESTA – Science in Society conference in 2009, slides 30-32
¹¹ Lakhani, K., & von Hippel, E. (2003). How Open Source Software Works: “Free” User-to-User Assistance. Research Policy, 32, 923-943.
¹² Science 11 February 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6018 pp. 698-699, “May the Best Analyst Win,” by Jennifer Carpenter.
¹³ http://www2.innocentive.com/

Cumulous cloud. Courtesy of Fotolia.

Lance McKee
Senior Staff Writer
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
+1 508-752-0108
lmckee@opengeospatial.org

This essay is a follow-on to my essay in the August 2010 issue of Earthzine, “18 Reasons for Open Publication of Geoscience Data.“¹ The premise of both is that science can be made more transparent and true to its principles through better use of Information Technology (IT) and a global infrastructure of technical standards that make it easy to publish, discover, assess and access data. This essay argues that in the geosciences, the necessary institutional commitment and technical standards are largely in place, but the standards’ availability and usefulness are not yet well known. As science fiction author William Gibson observed, “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”

Evidence Of Institutional Commitment

In the 24 August 2010 issue of EOS², in “Data Citation and Peer Review,” authors Parsons, Duerr and Minster argue that, “The scientific method and the credibility of science rely on full transparency and explicit references to both methods and data.”

Looking back a year, we see that the Geological Society of America (GSA), in its Open Data Access Position Statement³, adopted May 2005 and revised May 2009, “Strongly supports open access to scientific data by all purveyors of such data to promote advancement in research, support education, and improve the economic progress, health, and welfare of society.”

Eight years ago, the US National Academies’ 2002 “Geoscience Data and Collections: National Resources in Peril (2002)⁴” referenced the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) “Guidelines for Geoscience Data and Collections Preservation and Distribution,” whose “overall purpose and fundamental objective … is to ensure and facilitate full and open access to quality data for research and education in the Earth Sciences. These guidelines are considered to be a binding condition on all EAR-supported projects.”

We see from these examples that there has been an ongoing call for and official commitment to open publication of geoscience data. Progress is evident in programs like the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and OneGeology, through which national government agencies are beginning to share their data more openly. The EOS article cited above noted other efforts. Progress is also evident in the number of papers on this general subject that were presented at the recent IGARSS 2010 conference.⁵

The ocean observation community uses OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards.

Despite all of this, however, data created for most geoscience studies are unavailable, and most of the data that are available are difficult to find and use. In science as in other domains such as government, geospatial data are hard to discover and access for a number of reasons.⁶ Scientists and governments are still creating data in idiosyncratic and often complex data formats. Data have been and continue to be created in software-specific files and there is no guarantee that proprietary databases and database models will be maintained. Metadata, when provided, may be in non-standard schemas and may neglect important elements such as data dictionaries. Some obstacles are new: In the emerging world of service-oriented IT architectures, web-service derived results are ephemeral and typically lack any record of provenance, including service history. (Open standards for tracking geospatial data provenance in a Web services environment do not yet exist.)

To repeat from Parsons, Duerr and Minster: “The scientific method and the credibility of science rely on full transparency and explicit references to both methods and data.” “Climategate,” as well as the simple fact that most geoscience data are not available, suggest that, frustrated by the difficulties summarized above, scientists and the institutions of science have failed to provide the transparency that good science and credibility require.

Today’s Technical Standards Overcome Interoperability Obstacles

The concept of ”open science” involves scientists and researchers publishing, discovering, assessing and accessing not only research reports, but also the data and computation on which research findings are based. Current technology has the capacity to meet these functional requirements but only when the technologies implement existing open software interface and data encoding standards that allow the technologies to interoperate within a worldwide system.

Free and open standards, like TCP/IP and HTTP, encourage innovation and rapid acceptance, resulting in expanded networks of communication and sharing. Users and providers of geospatial technologies and data have been cooperating since 1994 in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)⁷ to develop free and open standards that enable communication between different geoprocessing systems from different vendors and of different types: GIS, Earth imaging systems, navigation systems, location services, sensor webs, databases, etc. Requirements have come from a wide range of stakeholders, resulting in a framework of open standards that enable, among other things, Web-based applications for publishing, discovering, assessing and accessing geoscientific data and computational resources.

Icerberg cleavage. Courtesy of Fotolia.

Implementations of the CSW standard make possible fine-grained searches of many kinds. For example, a wildlife biologist studying ducks in Canada might publish data that happen to include water temperature readings at certain locations. Years later (if the metadata included basic information about the temperature readings), a hydrologist searching for historical surface water temperature data in that region could easily discover this data, along with information about when and how the data were collected. Metadata tools, some free and open source⁹, are already available that streamline the creation of such metadata, and open source software code is available that streamlines implementation of CSW by software developers.

It is important for scientists to begin thinking in terms of Web services rather than file-based computing. Google Maps, for example, is a service offered over the Internet, enabled by the Web. A query returns useful information and little is required of the user in terms of expertise or hardware and software. Wolfram Alpha¹⁰ is perhaps a better example, because it is a Web service that provides sophisticated analytical capabilities that operate on many different kinds of data available from government agencies and other sources. The point is that both distributed data and diverse software services can be “in the cloud,” and this rapidly advancing paradigm promises to revolutionize the geosciences.

OGC Web Services standards specify the open interfaces and encodings necessary for building open Web services that provide access to virtually any kind of vector or raster data as well as processing functions that use that data. OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards¹¹ enable developers to make any Web-accessible sensor and/or sensor data repository discoverable, accessible and useable via the Web. This includes Earth observation sensors. Many, but not all, of the standards necessary for chaining of Web services, as in climate models, for example, are available. Others are in development.

Some geoscience communities, notably those involved in hydrology¹² and in meteorology and ocean observation¹³, have begun working in OGC Technical Committee working groups to facilitate their data sharing efforts based on these standards. Typically, this IT standards activity builds on prior data coordination efforts. Other OGC working groups¹⁴ focus on topics such as data preservation, geospatial rights management, data quality, geosemantics and workflow, all of which have significance for open science.

Wildlfire in the Amazon. Courtesy of Fotolia.

This brief discussion of standards leaves many important questions unanswered, such as: What is to be done with currently available data and services on the Web that do not implement standards? How will researchers’ data dictionaries be coordinated for cross-disciplinary studies? How much metadata expertise will be required of scientists, and will each data producer produce their own metadata?

A key question is “Who will pay for this?” David Hastings, creator of the Human Security Index, in a comment on my August Earthzine article, noted, “Geoscience Australia, formerly using the long-established restrictive Crown Copyright, now protects its intellectual property via the 21st century approach of Creative Commons licensing.” Will Geoscience Australia’s embrace of Creative Commons licensing become the norm or remain the exception? Standards from the OGC and other standards organizations provide much of the infrastructure for a market in proprietary scientific information. The market is important, because curation is essential but not free, and governments will almost certainly not pay all the costs. Someone has to review data and edit and index the literature; maintain the information in readable form, and keep it online as platforms change; and promulgate the use of specific standards. Technical standards will be necessary in Web-mediated management of privacy, liability and intellectual property, as well as professional attribution, a main currency of science.

Such questions require institutional responses. Technological change induces institutional change, but can the pace of institutional change keep up with the pace of technological change? Search companies and social networking companies, not geoscience institutions, are the main innovators in “data science”¹⁵, which focuses on turning massive datasets and data streams into information products. The institutions of science will need to imagine challenging scenarios. For example, what will be the result of millions, and soon billions, of sensor-packed cell phones, automobiles and buildings streaming location-specific environmental data into public repositories? What if these streams of data and associated, increasingly capable and publicly available cloud services result in a surge of citizen science? How will data integrity be addressed in this scenario?

We can expect funding institutions, publishers, scientific associations, universities and scientists themselves to develop new policies, behaviors, business models, funding propositions, and long-term data curation solutions. This will happen partly in response to new capabilities enabled by new technologies and technical standards, and partly in response to social, economic and political factors.

We know that none of this “just happens.” Each step depends on people making decisions and taking actions. The third article in this series will consider some of the risks and opportunities that will figure in such decisions.

References

¹ “http://www.earthzine.org/2010/08/04/18-reasons-for-open-publication-of-geoscience-data/.
² Transactions, American Geophysical Union http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010EO340001.shtml
³ http://www.geosociety.org/positions/pos7_dataOA.pdf
⁴ http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10348
⁵ Geoscience Depends on Geospatial Information Standards, Siri Jodha Khalsa and George Percivall. In the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Newsletter, December 2010. http://www.grss-ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/12.10.pdf
⁶ Preserving Geospatial Data: Challenges and Opportunities, Steven P. Morris
In the Proceedings Indo-US Workshop on International Trends in Digital Preservation, March 24-25, 2009.
⁷ http://www.opengeospatial.org
⁸ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geospatial_metadata
⁹ http://www.oceanteacher.org/OTMediawiki/index.php/Metadata_Tools
¹⁰ http://www.wolframalpha.com/
¹¹ http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/markets-technologies/swe
¹² http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/hydrologydwg
¹³ http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/meteodwg
¹⁴ http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/wg
¹⁵ “What is data science?” Mike Loukides, O’Reilly Radar
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/what-is-data-science.html

Lance McKee was on the startup team of the OGC in 1994 and currently serves as Senior Staff Writer. Over the years he has served on local not-for-profits (in Worcester, Massachusetts) and written to promote awareness of issues involving climate, energy and watershed awareness. His interests include the evolving use of information technology in science.

In recent years, it has become the state-of-the-art approach in disaster management to intervene, although nearly every concept or strategy highlights the higher efficiency of preparedness activities (e.g. LEWIS, 1999; COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES, 2001; UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL STRATEGY FOR DISASTER REDUCTION, 2008). Both emergency response after the impact of a disaster and development cooperation are subject to countless handicaps. Some of them appear in the chaotic situation after the event, others within the time of reconstruction.

The dimension of a natural catastrophe goes far beyond what is presented in the media. Personifying natural processes as “evil” leads to drastic consequences (PLOUGHMAN, 1995). People are decoupled from their natural surroundings, responsibilities are undefined and passed on. Increased vulnerability of communities at risk can have manifold reasons, whereas poverty is often presented as the major root cause. In fact, poverty is one crucial reason for high communal vulnerability, which triggers further interconnected weaknesses of the system, but by far not the only one.

Many people in threshold and developing countries suffer from systemic weaknesses. These circumstances mostly do not get any media attention. Compared to huge-scale disasters, their impacts are simply not as impressive. Nevertheless, high levels of vulnerability serve as the breeding ground for severe impacts of huge-scale disasters like floods or thunderstorms. Capacity building is nearly impossible, if economy and the political system are unstable. Lack of knowledge transfer and education nurtures the dispersal of diseases. The list seems endless.

Increasing Preparedness

A major problem of disaster management is that international (mostly North American or European) teams are well prepared, but the victims are not. Naturally, that leads to little trust in the helping teams’ activities and poor understanding of their actions. Besides, even National Societies of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in developing countries run the risk of losing face in front of their governments if they admit that a certain disaster exceeds their capacities. Since systemic vulnerabilities are far more distinct in developing countries, it is clear that international preparedness strategies have to focus on mutual capacity building in the Third World.

Table 1: Analysis of number of disasters, economic loss and casualties between 1991 and 2000 (adapted from IFRC, 2001)

Table 1 illustrates the number and consequences of natural disasters in developing, threshold and industrialized countries.

This is one of the reasons why Water and Sanitation Kits (WatSan-Kits) were developed. Their main purpose is to serve as a buffer before international assistance has to be requested. Experts from the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement help National Societies to practice on one of the three different types of WatSan-Kits in their own country to increase preparedness. Whether people in a developing country actually benefit from the technology was assessed in a master thesis at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria.

The Water and Sanitation Kit-Approach

WatSan-Kits were designed to strengthen local, regional and national capacities in disaster prone areas and pre-crisis situations. Depending on which kind of kit is pre-positioned, 2,000, 5,000 or 10,000 people can be provided with treated water, sanitation, hygiene promotion, vector control, etc. As a first means of intervention, the kits are operated either by regional or national disaster response teams (IFRC, 2008).

The kits are a lot easier to transport and operate for National Societies than emergency response equipment. Hence, they can replace the request for international emergency response units or at least serve as a buffer until they arrive. Figure 1 (below) compares the capacities of the kit system to standard emergency response equipment.

Fig. 1: Comparison of Emergency Response Units (ERU) and WatSan Kits

Prices range between 13,000 (Kit 2) and 106,000 Euros (Kit 10). While Kit 2 is more or less restricted to basic hygiene promotion and disinfection for scattered populations, Kit 10 already includes:

• a diesel pump

• water purification units (flocculation and coagulation units, sand filter, active carbon filter, chlorine dosing units, max. capacity 4 m³/h)

• a 10 m³ rigid water tank

• a 5 m³ bladder tank

• water quality testing equipment

• buckets, jerrycans, low flow water dispenser

• rapid latrine material, etc.

Case Study: United Republic of Tanzania

After a flood catastrophe in January 2010, the United Republic of Tanzania was the first country to gain practical experience with WatSan-Kits.

Relevant facts about Tanzania in a nutshell (SHARMA et al, 1996; DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS POPULATION DIVISION, 2009; WATER AID, 2010; OFFICIAL ONLINE GATEWAY OF THE UNITED REPUBLIC OF TANZANIA, s.a.):

• the population increased from 7.7 to 43.7 million between 1950 and 2009

• 80 percent of the population live in rural areas

• GDP is 251 US $/year (2001)

• 35-50% live below poverty line (numbers vary)

• Average life expectancy is 55 years

• Water supply coverage: 55 percent

• Average water collection time: 2 hours

• Freshwater resources are expected to decrease by 50% until 2025

• 23,900 children die of diarrhoeal diseases every year

• main driver for seasonal precipitation is the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).

The climatic vulnerability of the United Republic of Tanzania was shown in 1997/1998, when El Niño caused severe floods and droughts. The results were food shortages, skyrocketing food prices and enormous losses in cattle and cash crops. People had to walk up to 50 kilometers to receive emergency aid rations (EHRHART and TWENA, 2006).

Fig. 2: Location of Tanzanian Floods, January 2010 (RELIEF WEB, 2010)

The Flood Event

Heavy precipitation, which had started on 24^th of December 2009, lead to a major flood event in the Eastern parts of the country between the districts of Kilosa and Kongwa. Affected regions are highlighted in Figure 2.

According to RELIEF WEB (2010), more than 1,000 people were displaced and approximately 25,000 affected at the beginning. Infrastructure suffered enormous losses. Roads, bridges and rails were swept away. Around 1,000 houses were completely destroyed in Kilosa. Similar to the floods in 1997/1998, crops and wells, which served as main water supply, were flooded. And again cases of cholera and acute watery diarrhea were reported.

A first emergency appeal was launched on the 20^th of January 2010. In an operation’s update, it is reported that 50,000 people were affected and 28,000 had to leave their homes due to further heavy precipitation and a thunderstorm. The update especially highlights vulnerabilities that were caused by the collapse of the water and sanitation infrastructure.

International support was provided by the International Red Cross Federation’s Eastern Africa Regional office in Nairobi (Kenya) with WatSan-Kits 10. Three Austrian delegates, two Regional Disaster Response Team delegates and three WatSan officers of the Tanzanian National Society supervised the kit’s operation and maintenance. Additionally, Districts Mpwapwa and Kongwa received three WatSan 2 kits on the 16^th of February.

Performance of the Kits

WatSan-Kits are a complementary bottom-up instrument to various general top-down processes, such as the ones recommended in the UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL STRATEGY FOR THE DISASTER REDUCTION (2008): development of early warning systems and social safety nets, better insurance cover, avoidance of uncontrolled settling, etc.

Nevertheless, they cannot be regarded as a common preparedness activity or instrument. It is necessary to distinguish between vulnerabilities that lead to unsafe conditions (root causes) and others that are related to disaster relief. WatSan-Kits do not affect root causes, which finally pave the way for natural disasters. They can generally provide efficient disaster relief in the water supply sector, if some basic improvements are considered. Sanitation and hygiene promotion, for instance, is part of the kits’ concept, but practically under-represented. Only the most complex and most expensive, Kit 10 includes the full hygiene promotion add-on when it is pre-positioned.

Training is a crucial prerequisite to provide efficient emergency response. However, the training component especially has to be improved with regard to actual conditions in specific target countries. Delegates and affected people also need to understand dynamic pressures of hazards (WISNER et al., 2004) and that technical equipment is only one way of mitigating vulnerability (LEWIS, 1999).

An internal review of the IFRC (2008A) criticizes the purely technical focus of emergency response operations, which sometimes leads to a worse level of preparedness than before the impact of the disaster. WatSan-Kits could be designed in a far more interdisciplinary way. Vulnerability and capacity assessments have been carried out by the IFRC around the world. Obviously, standardized equipment and technically trained personnel are not enough to cope with the impact of a large-scale disaster.

Regarding the technical aspects of the kits, Red Cross staff mentioned three main weaknesses:

1. There were not enough spare parts.

2. Operation and maintenance were too complicated.

3. Training did not prepare team members well enough for emergencies.

However, one major advantage of the kits is that they might enable the local community to cope with small scale disasters without having to call for international help or losing face in front of the government.

The kits are standardized, which is both an advantage and disadvantage. Training people on the system should enable them to operate every kit around the world. Simultaneously, standardization neglects the individuality of locations and disaster events. Sometimes the major needs are pit latrines, sometimes emergency shelter, sometimes water supply.

Fig. 3: SWOT-Analysis - Results of a questionnaire and expert interviews

In this regard, especially the scientific basis for the kits pre-positioning, which does not exist yet, is crucial. The local National Society was lucky to be supplied with kits and delegates from neighboring countries. If the kits had been positioned in the United Republic of Tanzania from the beginning, the risk of impassable transport routes and delays would have been lower.

Figure 3 depicts a SWOT-analysis, which is based on results of a questionnaire that was sent to the Tanzanian Red Cross National Society and several discussions with experts in Austria and on site.

Thinking ahead

The fastest, cheapest and therefore most efficient way of providing a general baseline for the pre-positioning of preparedness tools is satellite navigation. Nevertheless, restricting a strategy to the use of Earth Observation satellites for vulnerability mapping only is not enough. In a world of countless interacting and developing vulnerabilities, it is extremely hard to get a holistic picture. An attempt to illustrate the already existing preparedness level of communities at risk would add a new layer to humanitarian aid. Combining this approach with already existing vulnerability and capacity assessments on site might even increase benefits of relief operations in the long run.

As a first step, some basic questions about the equipment of humanitarian aid organizations have to be answered:

• Which emergency response/preparedness tools located where (not only WatSan-Kits)?

• What is their condition with regard to future use? (Emergency response equipment is always left behind due to high costs for return transport)

• Do people on site know how to operate the equipment? Are these people available?

• How quickly can equipment be transported to the disaster area?

• In which radius can it be used?

Phase two aims at identifying a suitable environment for preparedness activities. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate:

• which interdisciplinary parameters indicate increased vulnerability

• which parameters can be assessed/monitored by satellite navigation.

That second step would enable more individual technical solutions and a scientific basis for the deployment of preparedness equipment. Additionally, communicating vulnerabilities by maps would give threatened societies with little experience in (natural) disaster response a tangible reason to practice the handling of preparedness tools and evacuation.

Especially in the water sector, identifying and monitoring key vulnerabilities requires information on their relation to capacities. A higher level of preparedness generally results in less need for acute intervention. Once again, satellite navigation plays an important role. Only preparedness tools whose locations are resilient to disasters can actually be used afterwards. Additionally, utilization rates could be increased by choosing locations wisely. At the moment, the majority of large treatment units run below 20 percent.

Besides meteorological parameters, a main influencing factor for droughts and floods is soil moisture. Surface soil moisture can be detected by active microwave sensors aboard polar orbiting satellites. The Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing at the Technical University Vienna developed an algorithm to model soil moisture up to a depth of 1 meter.

This technology will also play a role in an international GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) project of the European Commission and the European Space Agency. Eleven international universities and organizations started to work on the Global Water Scarcity Information System (GloWaSIS) in January 2011. Up-to-date information on water supply and demand (in situ- and satellite-based) can be a valuable input for preparedness strategies. Linking this approach to monitoring of preparedness capacities might finally lead to a paradigm-shift — from “look how many people we rescued with donated money” to “look how many people we did not have to rescue, because we assisted them in advance to cope with the situation.”

Sources:

COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES (2001): Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament – Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development – An Assessment, Brussels, Belgium

DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS POPULATION DIVISION (2009): World Population Prospects, Table A.1, 2008 revision. United Nations, at: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2008/wpp2008_text_tables.pdf (10.04.2010)

EHRHART, C. and TWENA, M. (2006): Climate Change and Poverty in Tanzania, Background report, CARE International Poverty-Climate Change Initiative

PLOUGHMAN, P. (1995): The American Print News Media “Construction“ of Five Natural Disasters, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., Oxford, UK

IFRC (INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF RED CROSS AND RED CRESCENT SOCIETIES) (2008): Standard Operating Procedures, Geneva Switzerland

IFRC (INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF RED CROSS AND RED CRESCENT SOCIETIES) (2008A): Water & Sanitation (WatSan) Emergency Response Units – A Review for the Future, WatSan Unit, Health & Care Department, Geneva, Switzerland

LEWIS J. (1999): Development in Disaster-prone Places – Studies of Vulnerability, London, GB

OFFICIAL ONLINE GATEWAY OF THE UNITED REPUBLIC OF TANZANIA (s.a.): Country profile, at: http://www.tanzania.go.tz/profilef.html (12.04.2010)

SHARMA, N.; DAMHANG, T.; GILGAN-HUNT, E; GREY, D; OKARU, V. and ROTHBERG, D. (1996): African Water Resources: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development, World Bank Technical Paper No.33, African Technical Department Series, The World Bank, Washington DC, USA.

UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL STRATEGY FOR DISASTER REDUCTION (2008): Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction, Geneva, Switzerland

WATER AID (2010): Tanzania, at: http://www.wateraid.org/international/what_we_do/where_we_work/tanzania/ (14.04.2010)

WISNER, B.; BLAIKIE, P.; CANNON, T.; DAVIS, I. (2004): At Risk – Natural hazards, people’s vulnerabilities and disasters, Second Edition, Routledge, New York

About the Author:

Markus Enenkel studied Natural Resource Management and Ecological Engineering at the University of Natural Resources, Vienna (Austria) and at Lincoln University, Christchurch (New Zealand). His research is focused on water management, disaster preparedness and microwave remote sensing.

Current projects include the user requirement study of the GLOWASIS Project. The dissertation at the Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (Vienna University of Technology) will deal with linking GLOWASIS to preparedness tools of humanitarian aid organizations.

First Place $500 — Earthships As An Affordable, Sustainable Part Of Vernacular Architecture by Nikolaos Meintanis, University of Sussex, England

Second Place $350 — Industrial Ecology: A Promising Approach to Attain Sustainability by John Paul Sipin De Guzman, National Cheng Chung University, Taiwan

Third Place $225 — Responsible Citizenship: In the Wake of Charles Darwin by Benjamin-Axel Mugema of Makera University, Uganda

Fourth Place $125 — Lead By Example by M. Injamam Alam, Institute of Business Administration, University of Dahka, Bangladesh

Each winner will also receive an Earthzine t-shirt and letter of recognition to their universities.

“The contestants submitted thoughtful, well-written and well argued essays. The contest’s objective to create international discourse among students on important environmental issues was met by the lively thought-provoking comments, questions and responses posted on the contest blog,” said Dr. David Mullins, Associate Editor for Education.

“We are deeply appreciative of the efforts of all the contestants. Our thanks also go to the judges, who ranked the winners on the basis of their essays and the quality of their blogs. We are grateful to the NASA Applied Sciences Program for supporting this contest, and to Dr. Mullins, for doing an excellent job managing Earthzine’s second essay competition,” said Dr. Paul Racette begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting, Editor-in-Chief.

Lena Häll Eriksson, head of the Swedish delegation to GEO and Director General of the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute

For more information, please visit www.earthobservations.org or contact Michael Williams at +41 22 730 8293 or mwilliams@geosec.org.

Speech by Mrs. Lena Häll Eriksson, Head of the Swedish delegation to GEO and Director General of the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, on behalf of the Swedish Minister for the Environment, Andreas Carlgren, at the GEO Beijing Ministerial Summit.

5 November 2010

Chairman, Ministers, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the Swedish Minister for the Environment may I express our sincere appreciation to the Government of China for hosting this very important and successful event.

Planet Earth is in trouble. Already humanity uses the equivalent of 1.4 planets to provide the resources we consume and to absorb our waste. The environmental, societal and economic challenges we are facing are huge, ranging from a rapidly increasing world population, industrial development, changing weather and climate patterns to globalization.

This year, we have seen an unprecedented sequence of extreme geophysical and weather-related events. Several regions of the world are still coping with the consequences of earthquakes, flash floods, widespread flooding, mudslides as well as heatwaves and drought, leaving many people in extreme distress. It is my sincere hope and ambition that knowledge, in terms of observations, data, information and know-how, will be shared within GEOSS [Global Earth Observation System of Systems] in order to mitigate the effects of such catastrophes in the future.

Sweden is part of the Arctic region and we are therefore concerned about the threats and challenges presented by a rapidly changing Arctic environment. This northernmost part of the planet is a bellwether for what the effects of climate change might do to the rest of the world. I believe therefore that Arctic observation networks need extra attention and should be fully coordinated within GEOSS.

Actions are needed to respond jointly to the global and regional challenges through international cooperation and coordination. I’m convinced that Earth observation and Earth observation-based systems and services are integral parts of that response. Today’s young people are well acquainted with modern information and communication technology and they are used to access relevant information in a timely and seamless fashion. I am convinced that the next generation of decision makers will take for granted that Earth observation data and services will be easily accessible in a harmonized and coordinated manner.

Sweden strongly believes in building a coordinated, comprehensive and sustained GEOSS. GEOSS will help us to enhance human health and safety, to protect the global environment, and to achieve food security and sustainable economic development. Thus, GEOSS is a strong and urgently needed catalyst on our way towards achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

Collaboration and commitment are the keys to realizing GEOSS. We need collaboration to ensure stable, reliable and long-term operations of our collective land, sea, cryosphere, atmosphere and space-based Earth observation networks and systems. We need collaboration to guarantee that our data and systems can be cross-linked and integrated, so they deliver an entity that exceeds the value of the sum of its individual components. And, collaboration helps us to establish a joint basis for sharing resources and infrastructure and for sharing knowledge, data and information.

Today, Sweden directly supports the work of GEO through a contribution to the GEO trust fund. At the international level, many of our contributions are channeled through existing European collaborations in the frameworks of ESA [European Space Agency], EUMETSAT [European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites] and ECMWF [European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts] and through Europe’s dedicated contribution to GEOSS, the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security Programme, GMES.

At the national level, Swedish government agencies and other stakeholders cooperate actively on spatial data infrastructure, standards and interoperability in the framework of the Swedish Geodata-Strategy, in line with the requirements of the EU-directive INSPIRE and the GEOSS. Full and open access to data and information is crucial, and progress is being made. Under the sponsorship of the Swedish Research Council, Sweden is currently building a national clearinghouse for climate and environment data, and a similar activity is underway for biodiversity. The clearinghouse will represent an important asset for the national and international research community, and be a dedicated Swedish contribution to GEOSS.

Chairman, distinguished delegates, Sweden is proud of being a member of GEO. We are impressed by the wealth of GEO-activities and results already achieved, and we will continue to support GEO in its important mission in building the GEOSS. Sweden applauds the Beijing Declaration as an important step forward on our joint path towards GEOSS.

Environmental, societal and economic challenges are tough, and GEO must and will play a vital role in finding and creating the solutions. Observe, share, inform: We have the pieces in our hands. It is our collective responsibility to put them together in a joint entity, and to truly realize the full potential of GEOSS within all GEO societal benefit areas.

Thank you.

Gregory Bateson, author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Photo courtesy of Barry Schwartz.

If we understand a little bit of what we’re doing, maybe it will help us to find our way out of the maze of hallucinations that we have created around ourselves.
~Gregory Bateson (Bateson, p.475)

Within the last decade, environmental concerns have seized public awareness to a previously unachieved degree. Growing public awareness of Earth’s environment is the one slender benefit of the imminent nature of the ecological crises facing our world’s population. Yet although awareness of the issues is crucial to solving them, it is only the first step toward greater ecological health, and the next step must be action. Before action, however, stands the perplexing question: “how?” Many individuals are eager, even desperate, to dive into the fray of the struggle to save our Earth, but even when a desirable course of action is clear (which is rare), how to achieve that goal is often unclear. What can be done to motivate individuals and societies to take action? How can we ensure that those actions are beneficial? One potential source of answers to today’s questions was proposed back in 1972. In that year, Gregory Bateson introduced a theory that proposed the need to change not just our actions, but our thoughts as well—to think about how we think. Bateson called this means of understanding ideas “ecology of mind.”

Ecology of mind as Bateson envisioned it, refers to an interdisciplinary approach to probing the way in which consciousness changes and forms patterns, both on a social and individual level. The purpose of such a study is analogous to the purpose of the study of biological ecology. Ecology of mind is based on the model of consciousness, or “mind ”, as being like an ecosystem, and ideas as being like the flora and fauna of this system. Like the plants and animals in a tangible ecosystem, ideas are then subject to evolution, extinction, or successful flourishing. In biological ecology, scientists strive to understand biological processes so that we can promote those we deem beneficial and avoid introducing destructive elements into the system. Bateson applied this same belief to his concept “ecology of mind”: if we wish to constructively shape the ideas produced by our society, then we must understand the processes by which ideas interact with one another and why some ideas thrive and others wither. As Bateson discussed in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, “science can give us something of a chart” to direct our course toward selected goals for social systems (Bateson, p.164).

South Platte River. Photo by E.C. Mulder, 2009

But for a movement to successfully take root in any society, individual as well as national character must be taken into account. Legislation and technology are limited in their capacity to address environmental issues; personal consciousness is deeply influential as well. Again, observing consciousness (“mind”) as an ecosystem provides an opportunity for guidance. As Bateson repeatedly emphasized in his works, no ecological system is completely closed. Think of a river flowing through a forest, or of pollutants carried by wind to high latitudes. Consciousness is not a closed system either.

The images, sounds, and emotions it is exposed to each day have a profound influence on the ideas already inhabiting that consciousness. Art, media, discussion, and education therefore become crucial in any attempt to rectify environmental wrongs. Attempts to steer information flow for any given purpose, however, run the dangerous risk of becoming pedagogical. Who is to decide precisely what the end should be?

Again, Bateson in his description of ecology of mind, provides guidance. Throughout Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson reiterates the idea that rather than trying to shape nature we should first endeavor to learn about how it functions and how we function within it. We would “do well,” he remarks, “to hold back our eagerness to control that world which we so imperfectly understand….Rather, our studies could be inspired by a more ancient, but today less honored, motive: a curiosity about the world of which we are a part. The rewards of such work are not power, but beauty” (p. 269.) Bateson’s manner of approaching knowledge might equally be applied to our studies of social thought, too. Trying to inform ourselves of how we think for curiosity’s sake rather than a specific end will help us avoid trying too much to dictate what people believe. Meanwhile, the wisdom we accrue will help us to decide how the changes in attitude that we wish to see may best be achieved.

The final aspect of achieving change, social or personal, is the motive used to instigate change. Incorporating a new analogy, industrial waste and detritus from fallen leaves can both provide nutrients that allow plants to grow, but most people feel that one source is superior to the other. The same could be said of the form in which information is offered to our consciousness. Often, ecological information is offered to the public in the form of fear as the prime motivator. Descriptions of punishments that may result should inadequate action be taken are to provide our impetus. But there is another means of fertilizing our desire to shift our actions. Once again, we can turn to Bateson for inspiration.

…we might be kept on our toes by a nameless, shapeless,
unlocated hope of achievement….the achievement need scarcely
be defined. All we need to be sure of is that, at any moment,
achievement may be just around the corner. (pp.175-176)

The beauty of this belief, as Bateson points out, is that “true or false, this can never be tested.” For the future always remains unknown, and possibility is perpetually there. To carry Bateson’s recommendation one step further, hope is a superior motivator to fear because fear has limited efficacy. If fear is introduced in surplus, then it becomes overwhelming and action becomes difficult. With hope, there is no such limitation.

Re-planting Marsh Grass. Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish & Wildlife

Quotations taken from the 1972 edition of Steps to an Ecology of Mind published by Chandler Publishing Company in New York. The book was re-issued in 2000 by the University of Chicago Press with a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson:

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry,
Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Biography

Gregory Bateson was born in 1904 in Granchester, England. He completed a bachelor’s degree in natural history (1925) and a master’s degree (1930) in anthropology at St. John’s of Cambridge University. During the 1930s, Bateson conducted anthropological research in New Britain and New Guinea. (The latter studies were carried out in conjunction with his first wife, Margaret Mead.) During his early research, Bateson began to conceptually explore the idea that analogies of form and pattern may exist between apparently diverse fields of thought. In the following years, Bateson continued to investigate relationships between fields, and his work ranged through psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, art, biology, cybernetics, and politics. Bateson’s career expanded to include teaching, lecturing, and publishing numerous books and articles in addition to conducting research. In 1972, Bateson drew from his lectures and papers of the previous three decades to compile Steps to an Ecology of Mind, and the result is a book that exemplifies how ideas can be approached in an interdisciplinary way and the relationship between varied areas of focus. Gregory Bateson continued to explore new ways of approaching science and thought until he died in 1980. He leaves behind a legacy of curiosity and intelligent inquiry.

For further information on Gregory Bateson and work:
The Institute for Intercultural Studies

Mr. Arjun Thapan, Special Senior Advisor to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) President for Infrastructure and Water

Introduction

Mr. Arjun Thapan was appointed Special Senior Advisor for Infrastructure and Water to Asian Development Bank (ADB) President Haruhiko Kuroda in January 2010 with the task of strengthening the communities of practice in Water, Energy, Transport, and Urban Development, and ensuring that ADB develops effective partnerships and knowledge platforms to deliver high quality policy and technical advice to its clients. He also guides the design and development of the ASEAN Infrastructure Fund. Mr. Thapan was previously the Director General of ADB’s Southeast Asia Department since 15 December 2006 after having been the department’s Deputy Director General from December 2004. He guided and oversaw ADB’s strategic agenda and development programs in Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Viet Nam, as well as the Greater Mekong Sub-region. A new relationship with Brunei Darussalam was forged during his tenure, and an important re-engagement with Malaysia developed. He was also responsible for the execution of the BIMP-EAGA and IMT-GT sub-regional initiatives of the department; both saw substantive growth in the range and scale of activities, including the first ever development of sub-regional projects. Mr. Thapan is a leading thinker on Water issues in Asia and a strong advocate of ADB’s water agenda. He served as Chair of ADB’s Water Committee until August 2008, and continues to guide the larger water community of practice at ADB. Mr. Thapan has led the initiative to double ADB’s investments in water and sanitation to over $2 billion annually. He is co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Water Security. His work on water policy issues, especially on “Water for ALL” for Asia’s developing countries, has been universally recognized; he is currently guiding the design of a water resources operational framework to sit within a Green Growth paradigm in ADB. Mr. Thapan is an Indian national with 34 years of professional experience. He joined ADB in 1991 as a Financial Analyst in the Infrastructure Department.

Mr. Arjun Thapan
Special Senior Advisor to the ADB President for Infrastructure and Water

Among Asia’s better-known records during the decade to 2010 is the dramatic reduction in poverty across the region. Regional income per capita has roughly doubled in the last 10 years. But despite these gains, security in food, water, health care, and livelihoods continues to plague many hundreds of millions within the Asia and Pacific region. While this is a daunting challenge in itself, it is compounded by the fact that Asia’s growth has come, in some significant part, at the expense of the physical environment – deforestation, land degradation, and the pollution of our water and air resources.

But this is not all. Climate change is our newest challenge. Asia is already experiencing the impact of climate variability, and its countries are now at risk through a combination of geography, patterns of settlement, and resource endowments. As all of us know, climate change is about water – Asia’s inhabitants will experience alterations in the hydrologic cycle, most likely including an increasing frequency and intensity of floods and droughts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified water, along with agriculture, as the sector “most sensitive to climate change-induced impacts in Asia.” Climate-related risks will exacerbate existing water stresses on the continent, which have resulted from rapid economic development, demographic changes and associated increases in water demand.

Many large Asian river basins are particularly vulnerable to regional warming, since Himalayan glaciers and snowfields serve as the region’s “water towers” supporting dry season and drought-year flows upon which roughly a billion Asians depend. And, in low-elevation coastal zones where many of Asia’s largest cities are located, sea level rise will further degrade coastal aquifers through saline intrusion, and threaten urban water supplies. This is already happening, for instance, in the Mekong delta where saline intrusion has progressed 80 kilometers inland and impacted on agricultural productivity and livelihoods. In a sense, the future is already with us. Overall, we believe that up to 1 billion Asians are potentially vulnerable to increased water stress by 2050 as a result of climate change.

From a recently published study on the world’s water resources in 2030 for 154 basins around the world, water requirements in 2030 will grow from 4,500 billion cubic meters (bcm) to 6,900 bcm, an increase of 40 percent. About a third of the world’s population, concentrated mainly in the developing world, will live in basins where the deficit will exceed 50 percent. In India and China, for instance, the aggregate gap is estimated to be 50 and 25 percent respectively. With economic growth and social equity so crucially dependent upon water, policy makers in Asia have some quick decisions to take if the crisis is not to overwhelm us.

It is uncertainty – rather than change – that currently represents the greatest challenge to decision makers in adapting to climate change in the water sector — do we act now on the basis of what we presently believe will occur, and risk the misallocation of scarce resources, or do we wait until the quality of our projections improves, and risk having waited too long?

Clients of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) consistently request improved mid-to-long term climate and water resources projections, methods and tools for climate change impact and vulnerability assessment, and resources for adaptation planning. This is sought in the context of water resources and disaster management. But while ADB is well positioned to facilitate the delivery of such tools and services, the development of scientific products, including the synthesis and interpretation of Earth observations, will come from partnerships such as an alignment of GEOSS and ADB around common objectives. These objectives include an improvement in the physical and social well-being of the region’s inhabitants, a reduction in the risks posed by climate variability and change, and protection of the region’s ecological health and biodiversity in the face of development pressures. A good example is the Integrated Citarum Water Resources Management Investment Program – a 15-year, $3.5 billion program in a strategically important basin in West Java, Indonesia. Climate-related risks include an increased flood hazard in the upper catchments, loss of hydropower capacity, reductions in water deliveries for irrigated agriculture and urban water supply (Jakarta), and threats to coastal aquifers from sea level rise. The GEOSS Asian Water Cycle Initiative (AWCI) is designed to address these challenges, through the sharing of “timely, quality, long-term information on water quantity and quality and their variation as a basis for sound decision-making of national water policies and management strategies.” In addition, both ADB and GEOSS/AWCI recognize the effectiveness of the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach to basin water resources management, and are supporting its implementation throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Let me emphasize that water, along with agriculture, has been identified as the sectors most sensitive to climate change-induced impacts in Asia. We must establish a sustainable pattern of development. Our experience and evidence show that a sustainable pattern of development needs to be disaster and climate resilient. Support for climate change adaptation can be supported through country-led developments in partnership with international organizations such as ADB and GEOSS to step up policy research, increase our knowledge, and build greater capacity. This collaboration will help us all become better prepared to understand and deal with climate change as it unfolds unpredictably in multiple ways.

Tomorrow’s Asia will be very different from the continent as we currently know it. Science and technology will help in identifying the factors most likely to impact sustainable development. Innovation will help in designing the solutions. GEOSS is very much a part of that effort and we commend the process of strengthening the Earth observation network.

Network Cables

Despite rapid advances in technical capabilities for data sharing, much of the data collected by Earth scientists (other than data from civil agencies’ satellite-borne imaging systems) is not easily available to other scientists. Given the fact that humanity faces critical environmental and resource challenges, the research community should take steps to make Earth location-referenced data much more discoverable, assessable, accessible and widely usable.

This article, the first in a series of three short articles, offers 18 reasons, or goals, that detail my understanding of this obligation. The next article will explain how open interface and encoding standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and other standards development organizations contribute to achieving these 18 goals. The third article will offer evidence that this change is well underway, gaining momentum, and inevitable, and it will include a few suggestions.

My point of view is that of an interested observer of science and someone with 16 years of participation in the OGC’s open geoprocessing standards initiative. I see parallels in the regime change that has occurred in the geospatial technology market and the regime change that is beginning in science. Often the most difficult obstacles to progress are institutional, financial and behavioral. Technical progress is often easier and it often precedes and forces the obsolescence of old policies, arrangements and behaviors. I see that happening in Science. I think this is healthy for Science and I want to make the geoscience community aware of the standards and the consensus standards process that I see as powerful agents for positive change.

Open data and open science are being discussed in various forums, such as the Open Knowledge Foundation’s “open-science” listserv, and my purpose in this article is not to frame a careful definition of either. I don’t address the thorny issues of ownership, copyright and privacy. I take the position that the current regime was shaped by technology in the late book publishing era and the early computer technology era, and the new regime will be shaped by 21^st century information and communication technology. In this context, the thorny issues will get sorted out by people who understand the potentials of technology, cherish the principles of science more than the traditions and institutions of science, and recognize the urgent requirement for better science.

Reason 1: Data transparency

Science demands transparency regarding data collection methods, data semantics and processing methods. Data – and scientific rigor — need to be documented! Subtending to this reason is another reason: cross-checking between data collections for sensor accuracy.

Reason 2: Verifiability

Science demands verifiability. Any competent person should be able to examine a researcher’s data to see if those data support the researcher’s conclusions.

Reason 3: Useful unification of observations

Being able to characterize, in a standardized human-readable and machine-readable way, the parameters of sensors, sensor systems and sensor-integrated processing chains (including human interventions) enables useful unification of many kinds of observations, including those that yield a term rather than a number. ¹

Reason 4: Cross-disciplinary studies

Diverse data sets with well-documented data models or application schemas can be shared among diverse information communities. (OGC defines an information community as a group of people, such as a discipline or profession, who share a common geospatial feature data dictionary, including definitions of feature relationships, and a common metadata schema.) Cross-disciplinary data sharing provides improved opportunities for cross-disciplinary studies.

Reason 5: Longitudinal studies

Archiving, publishing and preserving well-documented data yields improved opportunities for longitudinal studies. As data formats, data structures, and data models evolve, scientists will need to access historical data and understand the assumptions so that meaningful scientific comparisons can be conducted. Community standards will help ensure long-term consistency of data representation. (Subtending to this reason is another reason: support for study and advancement of scientific ontologies.)

Reason 6: Re-use

Open data enables scientists to re-use or repurpose data for new investigations, reducing redundant data collection and enabling science to be done more efficiently.

Reason 7: Planning

Open data policies enable collaborative planning of data collection and publishing efforts to serve multiple defined and yet-to-be-defined uses.

Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, US

With open data policies, institutions and society overall will see greater return on their investment in research, most directly because of reasons 6, 7 and 17, but perhaps most significantly because of reason 15.

Reason 9: Due diligence

Open data policies will help research funding institutions perform due diligence and policy development because it will be easier to review researchers’ and research programs’ past performance with respect to data quality and metadata quality.

Reason 10: Maximizing value

The value of data increases with the number of potential users. This benefits science in a general way. It also creates opportunities for businesses that will collect, curate (document, archive, host, catalog, publish), and add value to data. (Similar to Metcalf’s law: “The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square [or, some would say, some positive exponent not always 2] of the number of connected users of the system.”)

Reason 11: Data discoverability

Open data is discoverable data. Data are not efficiently discovered through literature searches or conventional search engines. Data registered in OGC standard catalogs using ISO-standard XML-encoded metadata enable efficient and fine-grained searches.

Reason 12: Data exploration

Robust data descriptions and quick access to data will enable more frequent and rapid exploration of data – “natural experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment)” – to explore hypothetical spatial relationships and to discover unexpected spatial relationships.

Reason 13: Data fusion

Open data improves the ability to “fuse” in-situ measurements with data from scanning sensors. This bridges the divide between communities using unmediated raw spatial-temporal data and communities using spatial-temporal data that is the result of a complex processing chain. ²

Reason 14: Service chaining

Open data (and open online processing services) will improve scientists’ ability to “chain” Web services for data reduction, analysis and modeling.

Reason 15: Pace of science

Open data enables an accelerated pace of scientific discovery, as automation and improved institutional arrangements give researchers more time for field work, study and communication.

Reason 16: Citizen science and outreach

Open science will help Science win the hearts and minds of the non-scientific public, because it will make science more believable and it will help engage amateur scientists – citizen scientists – who contribute to science and help promote science. It will also increase the quality and quantity of amateur scientists’ contributions. ³

Reason 17: Forward compatibility

Open Science improves the ability to adopt and utilize new/better data storage, format, discovery, and transmission technologies as they become available. ⁴

Reason 18: Timely intervention

“Changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three, one reason we need real-time science. … Governances must be able to see and act upon key intervention points.” ⁵

I welcome additions to this list.

The purpose of creating open geoprocessing interface and encoding standards has not been to create a revolution in scientific institutions’ policies, or in scientific publishing businesses or scientists’ workflows and incentive structures. But such standards will certainly contribute to this revolutionary change, as advances in geospatial interoperability become known and useful to people who sincerely care about the basic requirements and values of science.

I hasten to add that the opinions expressed here are my own and are not to be seen as official positions or policies of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

¹From an email exchange with Simon Cox, JRC Europe and CSIRO Australia, editor of ISO 19156 (Observations and Measurements), coordinator of OneGeology geoinformatics, a designer of GeoSciML, and chair of the OGC Naming Authority.

²From an email exchange with Simon Cox.

³From a conversation with Gordon Thompson, Executive Director, Institute for Resource and Security Studies (IRSS) and Research Professor, George Perkins Marsh Institute.

⁴Offered to OGC’s David Arctur for this list on 6 January 2010 by Sharon LeDuc, Chief of Staff, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina, USA.

⁵Brian Walker, Program Director Resilience Alliance and a scientist with the CSIRO, Australia.

As the Editor, I look at Earthzine’s logo tagline and wonder what Fostering Earth Observation and Global Awareness means. Here are some musings of my wonder.

In October 2006, I was approached by Drs. Jay Pearlman and Albin Gasiewski of the then newly formed IEEE Committee on Earth Observation (ICEO) and asked to lead the development of a new online magazine as an IEEE contribution to the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observation (GEO) and its 10-year plan of establishing Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS). The ICEO supports GEO and the development of GEOSS in providing Earth information needed to address challenges such as global warming, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and other barriers to sustainable development. GEOSS is envisioned to be the global infrastructure required for effective utilization of Earth information derived from the vast amounts of data from existing and future observing remote and in situ sensor systems. One year later, www.earthzine.org was launched.

Earthzine fosters Earth observation (EO) by supporting the development of GEOSS and publishing articles pertaining to the GEOSS nine societal benefit areas, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Climate, Disasters, Ecosystems, Energy, Health, Water, and Weather. Earthzine hosts seasonal themes that highlight the social benefits of EO and explores how EO can address such challenges as Meeting the New Millennium Development Goals. Earthzine’s student essay contests bring together students from around the world in discussions about EO and sustainability. Providing our youth with an international forum for sharing views and discussing solutions for our most pressing issues makes good sense. In addition to seasonal themes, Earthzine distributes a Newsletter on the full moon. If you don’t already, please subscribe; it’s free!

And so how does one foster Global Awareness? It seems that fostering EO for the benefit of society fosters Global Awareness.

It is through observation that we become aware. This is true for the monk who through prayer and meditation observes One’s magnificence, the astronomer looking through the telescope across time who sees the structural evolution of the universe, and the mother who keeps vigilant watch for danger to her offspring. From the source of the Big Bang to our most inner sense of spirituality, the deeper we look in any direction, the closer we come in realizing our universal existence is just but One Life.  We each have our unique sense for what it means to be alive and globally aware; and it’s within the collective of all our senses that Global Awareness emerges as a life form of its own.

Dreams are born and die as part of the cycle on which hope carries us forward. For the first time in Earth’s history, humans are aware of our species’ capacity to adapt and modulate Earth’s life-sustaining cycles on a global scale. Urban sprawl, unabashed thirst for energy and resources, and the use of toxins in our industrial processes have discernable and often deleterious effect on human life and environed ecosystems. Just look around and we can see human impact on Earth in the form of our cities and large agricultural estates where we harvest our nourishment. We see merciless killing in ideological wars that scar the planet. Atomic, biotech and other horrific weapons give us the ability to self-annihilate. There’s little uncertainty in that humanity’s explosive population growth over the past hundred years has transformed the surface of Earth and its life-sustaining ecosystems from local to continental scales. In a million years from now what awareness will there be of Life on Earth?

Global Awareness is recognizing that Life on Earth is what we must protect.

We protect the life of our young as well as the spirit in the fire. To protect Life is to value and care for that which warms our heart during the cold night’s torrent of rage against all life, Death, … so that we may wake to a new dawn with all the splendor that Life has to offer.

How well can we protect another if we do not first protect ourselves? Protecting life begins with valuing and caring for one’s own; in this way our interdependency leads us to understand the need to give so that others, too, may live. And therein lies the wisdom in developing GEOSS for the benefit of society. The collective answer lays within the recognition of humanity’s role in stewardship of the Earth and our awareness that human activity affects all life on the planet. For this very important reason we must care for our own kind in all forms. For where ever humans suffer, so does Life on Earth.

Life is different for everyone thus making every life unique. Life is many things not the least of which is living present in the joy of knowing that we are but one life in many experiencing the joys of Life’s living.   Hmmmm…:)

My daughter experiencing the joy in discovering herself in the mirror for the first time.

With rockets we send humans and sensors to space that return to us images of Earth with a background of cosmic proportions.  And in our pictures we see that decisions made at the individual, local, regional and global scale all affect the life that exists on Earth. Through our observations we are just beginning to comprehend Earth’s regulatory processes that have served to support life up to the point in which we now live, and what it means to be aware that the future of Life on Earth is forever shaped by human activity.  How do we as the human species move forward in a way in which Life may prosper?

Therein lays the potential of Fostering Earth Observation and Global Awareness. Observing the Earth includes collecting data with sensors that detect and record Earth’s biogeophysical processes and understanding the benefits of those observations and the utilization of Earth information on the global community. Global Awareness entails looking beyond the discerned effect being observed to the impact of the observation on ourselves and others. Earthzine probes these complex issues through interviews with leaders in the EO community and articles that explore GEOSS’ broad objective for societal benefit. We each observe the Earth and have a unique perspective. I invite you to share your views by posting comments, submitting an article or writing an opinion essay.

We today see images of friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers from around the planet we all share. ‘Hey you! You’re on the same planet as I am.’  That we are, and One of many in Life!

Blessings my friend,

Paul Racette, DSc
Editor-in-Chief

The Eiffel Tower, an icon of human achievement, is obscured by a thick fog.

Climate skepticism is attracting greater attention by news and social media networks. A disturbing undercurrent entails the perception that climate change is an invention forged by climate scientists. Such distortion is another example of the “conspiracy theories” of recent years, “theories” that argued: Darwin’s theory of evolution is satanic; concentration camps and gas chambers did not exist; Neil Armstrong never walked on the Moon; the World Trade Center was not destroyed by terrorists; etc… Now a few climate change contrarians are refuting the work of thousands of technicians, engineers, and researchers around the world who are dedicated to understanding what is indeed a very complex system. Understanding climate requires the combined efforts of experts in diverse scientific disciplines because understanding climate involves physical, chemical, biological, and socioeconomic interactions and feedbacks. Contrarians contribute to the confusion in the general population by shedding doubt on the validity of numerical model projections, whereas, there already exists a preponderance of empirical evidence that the rapid growth of human population over the past century has resulted in deleterious environmental change with significant societal impact. Indeed, there is no Climate Skeptic Observing System. Scientific instruments provide evidence of the global temperature increase near the surface and decrease in the stratosphere, of changes in atmospheric composition, of sea level rise, sea ice and glaciers melting, deforestation, etc.

The knowledge a person possesses is a very strong determinant of what information is perceived and the value of its importance. Could climate skepticism simply result from unsophisticated epistemological beliefs preventing acceptance of evidence that conflicts with a flawed mental model of how the climate works more than from a conspiratorial attitude? Learning often involves modifications in core knowledge and beliefs, which at times can be strongly resisted and an obstacle to conceptual change. Providing solid and comprehensive education based on sound Earth observations is an important step forward to alleviating the fog of confusion about climate change and human interaction with the Earth’s environment.

There remain large uncertainties in our understanding of the climate and greater uncertainty in the impact of climate change on human civilization. Addressing these uncertainties requires hard work and more observations, scrupulous attention to data calibration and validation, data examination, inter-comparing model projection and quantifying their uncertainties, understanding the differences, criticizing results. We believe that GEOSS, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, has the potential to provide the observations and infrastructure needed for climate monitoring, understanding and prediction. The serious message sent by the climate research community is disturbing to most people; powerful interests are at stake that will entail drastic reorientation of energy sources and economic development. But an even higher interest is at stake: that of our children and of future generations. Our descendants deserve as clear a sky as we can bequeath to them.

About The Authors Jean-Louis Fellous and Catherine Gautier

Dr. Jean-Louis Fellous

Jean Louis Fellous is the Executive Director of COSPAR (ICSU Committee on Space Research) in Paris, France. An atmospheric scientist by training, Dr. Fellous was program manager of the U.S.-French ocean satellite TOPEX/Poseidon launched in 1992. He led Earth Observation programs at CNES until 2001 and ocean research at IFREMER until 2005. He was elected co-president of JCOMM (the WMO/IOC Joint Commission on Oceanography and Marine Meteorology) in 2005. In mid-2005 Fellous was seconded by the CNES to the European Space Agency, and later appointed as the Executive Officer of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), a position he held through 2007.

Dr. Catherine Gautier

Catherine Gautier, an Earth System scientist, is professor of Geography and principal investigator of The Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara campus. Dr. Gautier works in an environment in which Earth and computer science are strongly coupled. Her focus is on research and graduate education in Earth system sciences (the science of climate change), with emphasis on processes governing the radiative processes of the Earth. Previous appointments include serving as director of the Institute of Computational Earth System Science, 1996-2002, chief executive officer of Planet Earth Science Inc., 1994-2004, and associate director and associate research meteorologist, California Space Institute, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego from 1982-1990.

Fellous and Gautier are co-authors/or editors of three recent books on climate change. Gautier is sole author of one.

Gautier and J-L Fellous, 2008: Eau, Petrole, Climat: Un Monde en Panne Seche, Book, pp 320, Odile Jacob, Paris, France.

Gautier C. and J-L Fellous, 2008 (co-editors): Facing climate change together, Book, pp 257, Cambridge University Press.

Gautier C., 2008: Oil, Water and Climate: An Introduction, Book, pp 366, Cambridge University Press.

Fellous J-L and C. Gautier, 2007 (co-editors): Comprendre le changement climatique. Book, Odile Jacob, Paris, France.

Editor’s Note: The diversity of viewpoints and opinions on Earth observations and sustainability is extensive. To accommodate and foster the benefits of this diversity, Earthzine encourages the inclusion of a wide range of perspectives in a vibrant discourse on relevant contemporary issues. Considerate debate and thoughtful discussion are encouraged in comments posted on Earthzine’s blog. Please consult the Earthzine Editorial Policy for further detail and consider submitting an opinion essay.