Who is Max Craglia? Massimo (Max) Craglia is a senior scientist in the Unit of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission that has the responsibility for the technical development of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe. Within the Unit, he is responsible for the development of the INSPIRE Implementing Rules for Metadata, and for research on the impact assessment of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) and INSPIRE. He also is the technical coordinator of EuroGEOSS project, an Integrated Project developing INSPIRE-compliant GEOSS Operating Capacity in three thematic areas: Drought, Biodiversity/Protected Areas, and Forestry. In addition, Max is one of the founders of the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science and the editor of the International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research. Prior to joining the JRC in 2005, Max was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, teaching GIS for urban planners, and researching areas of spatial data infrastructure deployment, use, and data policy. Max holds a degree in Civil Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy; a MPhil in Urban & Regional Planning from the University of Edinburgh; and a PhD in GIS and Planning from the University of Sheffield. His books include “GIS and Evidence-Based Policy Making,” with Steve Wise, “GIS in Public Health Practice” with Ravi Maheswaran, “Geographic Information Research: Transatlantic Perspectives” with H. Onsrud and “Geographic Information Research: Bridging The Atlantic” with H. Couclelis.

The first step in making sense of the processes and events that impact the Earth is to observe and analyze them. The next step is to share those observations and analyses with your peers in the context of a shared infrastructure. Today, however, there are dozens of such shared infrastructures, each with its own set of policies, terms and protocols. The content is written in dozens of languages, and may cover the same ground multiple times. As Dr. Massimo (Max) Craglia, technical coordinator of the EuroGEOSS project, explains:

“Over the last 15 years, there have been a lot of developments worldwide to develop infrastructures to share spatial and environmental data. These have been mainly government led, and focused on research and policy. The problem we faced in Europe was that these different infrastructures did not use the same technical protocols, and therefore could not communicate across borders. Moreover, their content was in different languages (23 in the European Union alone), and major semantic differences existed across disciplines.”

One answer to this complex situation is the creation of The Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE). INSPIRE is a European directive, adopted in 2007, and in the process of being implemented. The INSPIRE legislation obliges all nations in the European Union to “ensure that the spatial data infrastructures of the Member States are compatible and usable in a community and transboundary context.”

INSPIRE provides a series of technical guidelines and specifications to ensure that all European spatial data infrastructures work together. The Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission (EC) is the Technical Coordinator of this activity, but other directorates also are involved.  The European Directorate-General for the Environment is leading the policy aspects, since INSPIRE addresses mainly environmental issues, while Eurostat will run the operational components. According to the INSPIRE website, the key principles of INSPIRE are that:

• Data should be collected only once and kept where it can be maintained most effectively;
• It should be possible to combine seamless spatial information from different sources across Europe and share it with many users and applications;
• It should be possible for information collected at one level/scale to be shared with all levels/scales; detailed for thorough investigations, general for strategic purposes;
• Geographic information needed for good governance at all levels should be readily and transparently available;
• It should be easy to find what geographic information is available, how it can be used to meet a particular need, and under which conditions it can be acquired and used.

INSPIRE is an important European contribution to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems. Other contributions from Europe include the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security initiative, and dedicated research projects. This is where EuroGEOSS comes in.

EuroGEOSS, funded by the European Union Framework Programme for Research & Development, is a three-year project intended to advance the state of the art of infrastructures like INSPIRE.

Illustration of Brokering Framework. Source: EuroGEOSS

Says Dr. Craglia: “EuroGEOSS involves access to data, but it also says ‘yes, data is important – but more important is what you do with the data afterwards.’ If you are trying to address complex issues like climate change or impact of society on the environment and vice versa, you must analyze, build models, make forecasts.

“In this project, we are trying to move beyond access to data, and make sure specialists describe what they do with the data to address different questions. All the knowledge experts have in their heads through their training is brought out into the open, formalized, and published so that the models that people would ordinarily create in their offices are also available to the wider scientific community. We are trying to create an environment in which scientists in different specialties can collaborate with a shared perspective to address different chunks of a problem.”

Craglia notes that collaboration is difficult, especially when it crosses both disciplines and language barriers. Thus, the challenge of EuroGEOSS is to develop tools to bridge traditional chasms between and among scientific communities.
The EC and JRC already have information systems that relate to drought, forestry and biodiversity, and so those three themes were selected as a focus for EuroGEOSS in its first three years.

Specifically, for example, “Biodiversity” addresses national parks in Africa because the EU is a major donor of aid in Africa, so there’s a policy demand to develop priorities for where to put the money.

Drought and Forest have a more European focus but they also are contributing to global initiatives. By focusing on specific areas of interest, EuroGEOSS can create a template that includes linkages across multiple systems so they can work together as one; not only accessing data but also providing models, forecasts, and possible scenarios. Once the templates are complete, it will become possible to expand the model to other thematic areas.

How is it possible to share information across disciplines, languages and infrastructure? The answer, now actively in use through EuroGEOSS, is a “brokering framework.” According to the EuroGEOSS website, “The EuroGEOSS Broker is able to interface with the web services in each of the three thematic areas, regardless of the different standards they use. In practical terms, the broker takes a request from a user as an entry, translates and dispatches it between the referenced services. In return, it merges and displays the results from the services.”

Says Dr. Craglia, “To develop the broker, you need to go out into different scientific communities and find out what is important to them, and how they address a problem. To do that, you need to sit, for example, with someone responsible for creating a map of forested areas in Europe and ask, “how do you do it?”

The likely response will be, Craglia says, “I create a map of an area that’s forested.” But then the question must be asked, “What do you mean by forest?” Unfortunately, the answer to that question is as varied as the people involved.

For example, “A forest can have no trees at all in England, as the term was used for the hunting reserves of kings. So there are English ’forests‘ with no trees. You can find definitions of forest that run for hundreds of pages. In some of the work we do, we adopt for example the definition of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), because you can’t cater for all definitions of forest — but you must make explicit which one you’re adopting for a particular application, what you do to reach an answer to a particular question. The key is that you are comparing apples to apples.”

Next, “You go through the process that each specialist goes through; you describe the process in language or in a more formal way. There are formal languages (such as the Business Processes Modeling Notation or BPMN) that allow- formal description of the process. Then you refine the process further into the work flow. Eventually, you can make the workflow executable by computers and thus create a service that’s published on the web.”

The EuroGEOSS Broker is a breakthrough in multi-disciplinary, international collaboration. It’s also, says Craglia, a “huge paradigm shift. If you’re a specialist you do all your work on the computer on your own; if you make the process more open and explicit, and run it on the web, potentially millions of people can use it and understand the science better.” The program is already available on the web, and is in use by investigators in specific fields of environmental research.

While the process of developing the Broker is time-consuming and complex, says Craglia, it’s working. “One proof of the pudding is that we are halfway through the project and the work we’ve developed has been recognized as so useful that we’re asked to contribute to a demonstration for the next GEOSS plenary.

“The architecture we’ve put in place is essentially based on acknowledging the differences in different disciplines. Through the work we’ve done we’ve realized that disciplines have different professional languages, styles, standards, and ways of collecting and sharing information. There are good reasons for the differences, so if you want to bring them together you can’t force them into a single template. You can’t be a dictator. People will say ‘no thanks.’ Instead, you build bridges. You learn to listen and understand what people do. You build technology that provides connections among different standards and information systems so they can communicate.”

According to the EuroGEOSS site, “The development for interoperability in EuroGEOSS has three phases: Interoperability within domains – across regional and national data bases; interoperability between the three focus domains of the project; and broad interoperability across the nine societal benefit areas of GEOSS. The EuroGEOSS project ends in April 2012, but another project will continue its work addressing the areas of Weather, Oceans, and Water (GEOWOW).

Alberto Moreira, IEEE-GRSS President

By Paul E. Racette, DSc

Dr. Alberto Moreira, president of the IEEE Geosciences and Remote Sensing Society, has a dynamic vision for remote sensing that is now, he says, in its golden age. And he sees that the rewards of maturity also bring responsibility. “This is a living Earth. We have a responsibility to leave the Earth at least in as good of condition as it is today.”

Dr. Moreira is a pioneer in research and development of high-resolution radar signal processing, innovative synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system concepts and associated techniques like radar tomography, digital beam forming and advanced imaging modes. He received the B.S.E.E. and the M.S.E.E. degrees, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, from the Aeronautical Technological Institute ITA, Brazil and the Eng. Dr. degree (Honors) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, 1993. In 2003, he received a full professorship from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in the field of Microwave Remote Sensing. As its chief scientist and engineer, Prof. Moreira managed from 1996 to 2001 the SAR Technology Department of the Microwaves and Radar Institute at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Since 2001, he is the director of the Microwaves and Radar Institute at DLR. The Institute contributes to several scientific programs and space projects for actual and future air- and space-borne SAR missions. Prof. Moreira is the Principal Investigator for the TanDEM-X mission led by DLR.

His personal interests are dynamic, too. He is South American from Sao Jose dos Campos in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He went to Germany for his PhD and met his wife, also a Brazilian, in an art museum, an interest they share. His father is an architect, plays the violin and paints and his mother is a professional musician, from whom he learned to play the piano. He and his wife have two children, 12 and 14. His hobby, begun when he was 17, is gliding a tow airplane without a motor in which he has participated in world championships. “It’s incredible the flight of gliders, a very nice experience. And this perhaps inspired me to work with space research. When you fly you are like a bird and can see the ground below, just like remote sensing.”

Paul Racette, Earthzine Editor in Chief, interviewed Alberto Moreira at the 2010 IGARSS in Honolulu.

Earthzine: How did you enter the field of remote sensing?

Alberto Moreira: My professor in Brazil told me if I wanted to make good research in my field I should go to either the United States, Europe, or somewhere else. I got a scholarship from the German government and with that I came to DLR, the German Aerospace Center, in ’86, to earn a PhD in synthetic aperture radar. And this was a very challenging time for SAR because at that time, a few people had a deep understanding onhow it works. Even the digital processing algorithms that could deliver a very focused image were not well understood. And my task at DLR was to develop a real-time algorithm for our airborne SAR. At that time we had workstations that were very slow. It took two days to process one SAR image, with some ten by ten kilometers. They had a request to have these in real-time. That was the topic of my PhD to develop an algorithm for real-time airborne SAR processing. At the end of my PhD, this was implemented in the airborne SAR. We had twenty-eight digital signal processors, dedicated computational units. We could have SAR images in real-time with three meters resolution, and these were used for more than ten years during innumerous airborne campaigns.

Earthzine: You’re now the director of the Microwaves and Radar Institute.

Alberto Moreira: This does not happen very often at DLR. I made a sort of career at DLR at the start as a PhD student. I was contracted as a researcher and then, after three years, I was a group leader responsible for ten people. In ’96, I got the responsibility of a full department with some 35 people. Then in 2001, I was very proud to be selected as the director of the microwaves and radar institute. We are some 130 people. Our institute is shaping the future radar missions of the German space program. All the new radar missions in Germany are coming from our institute.

Alberto Moreira and IEEE President John Vig present Prof. Ya-Qiu Jin the 2010 IEEE GRS-S Education Award

Earthzine: Does that include the ESA, the ERS-1?

Alberto Moreira: We have made substantial contributions in the conceptual analysis, the performance estimation and calibration for all the ESA radar missions. For the Sentinel-1 we have a contract from industry for defining the calibration algorithms of the mission. We have also had international programs with NASA. Since the eighties we have been collaborating with JPL in the scope of the Shuttle Imaging Radar missions SIR-C/X-SAR, and also SRTM. DLR has contributed with the X-band radar systems for these missions. SIR-C/X-SAR in ’94 was a milestone in radar development because this was the first mission with three radars at three different frequencies. In 2000, with the SRTM [Shuttle Radar Topography Mission] we had one radar from JPL, a C-band radar, and the X-band radar from Germany, both for topographic mapping. That mission was also again a milestone in remote sensing because the topographic data from interferometric SAR measurements became a reference for the geocoding of remote sensing data for geoscience applications.

Earthzine: The TerraSAR-X is Germany’s first radar satellite.

Alberto Moreira: That’s a mission in a public-private partnership between DLR and the German industry. TerraSAR-X was launched in June 2007. Since then it is supplying high-resolution radar images for scientific and commercial applications. TerraSAR-X is the fruit of consistent development of German radar technology over many years and is an example of successful cooperation with the German space industry. Our institute is responsible for the system engineering, radar instrument operation and calibration and is involved in a number of scientific proposals for data evaluation.

Earthzine: How many free flying SARs have been launched?

Alberto Moreira: We have a tremendous development in the radar area. Ten years ago, we had two satellites: RadarSat-1 was one and the ERS-2. These were single frequency, no polarization and so on. As of today we have fifteen spaceborne radars flying with different frequencies and polarizations and this has been a huge development. The great number of SARs in space is a prominent example of the golden age of remote sensing.

TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X formation flying to collect interferometric SAR imagery

Earthzine: Fifteen SARs?

Alberto Moreira: All SARs! In addition to ERS-2 and Radarsat-1, that are still operating, we have three CosmoSkymed satellites, we have the ENVISAT/ASAR satellite, we have ALOS/PALSAR, we have the TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, TECSAR from Israel, five SAR-Lupe satellites, and Radarsat-2. So we have now indeed sixteen and a new era for SAR remote sensing!

Earthzine: So you are the Principal Investigator on the TanDEM-X.

Alberto Moreira: In 2001 we started with the realization of TerraSAR-X satellite in Germany. And then in 2003, the national call for the next Earth Observation mission after TerraSAR-X was issued in Germany. I had the vision at that time: our institute should submit a strong proposal for a first interferometric SAR mission with close formation flying because of the huge demand for digital elevation models with improved quality. In 2006, we were very happy that the German space agency selected our mission proposal, TanDEM-X, for implementation. That was a challenge: A lot of changes could not be done as we would like because TerraSAR-X was almost built and scheduled to be launched in 2007. We started indeed in 2004-05 doing the kind of minimal changes in TerraSAR-X in order to allow for a bistatic radar operation. TerraSAR-X was launched in 2007 and TanDEM-X now in June 2010.

Earthzine: So it just launched recently.

Alberto Moreira: Very recently, but our team is so strong: three days after the launch, we produced our first radar image! This is a world record, normally it takes a few weeks or even months to have the first image. And just last week, 25 days after the launch of TanDEM-X we were able to produce our first DEM [digital elevation map] with a height accuracy of about 30 cm. Still, with a big separation between the satellites, as they are flying three seconds behind the other, this is more or less 20 kilometers. They are approaching very slowly and in the middle of October they will be just about 250 meters from each other!

Earthzine: What are the objectives of the TanDEM-X mission?

Alberto Moreira: The primary objective is to produce a new global digital elevation model with accuracy much better than what is currently available. Today what we have globally is about ten meters height accuracy. From SRTM we don’t have the icecaps, we only have DEM data within ±60 degree latitude because the shuttle could not cross the poles. With TanDEM-X we will have global coverage of consistent quality with horizontal spacing of about 12 meters and a height accuracy of 2 meters. For local areas, we can achieve accuracy that is even better than one meter in the height. For example, last week our first DEM had an accuracy of about 30 centimeters. Because the separation is so big, the interferometer becomes very sensitive. But we cannot map the whole Earth, for example the Himalayas, the Alps, or Rocky Mountains with accuracy of ten centimeters. That’s too sensitive: you lose control of the topography. In the first year, we’ll map the Earth with accuracy of about four meters. Then we’ll map it again the next year with much higher accuracy. The two products will deliver a high quality DEM with accuracy of about two meters.

Earthzine: Now, GEOSS is built around the nine societal benefit areas. What are the societal benefits of TanDEM-X?

Alberto Moreira: Basically, the global DEM, is the first goal of TanDEM-X. With this product we make contributions to the following 5 GEOSS benefit areas. One example is hydrology. Water flows according to the ground slope. If we use the present-day DEM’s ten meters accuracy to simulate waterflow, then you can see how inaccurate water modeling can be. Other benefit areas are disaster (e.g. high resolution 3D maps of affected areas), climate (topographic maps of the polar caps providing high-resolution information about the ice melting), agriculture (biomass estimation of crop fields by using the innovative technique of polarimetric SAR interferometry) and ecosystems (monitoring of forest areas, aforestation and deforestation). We are also planning to produce global maps on land use change since we are going to map the whole land masses twice.

Earthzine: How are you incorporating the TanDEM-X data sets with GEOSS?

Alberto Moreira: We are working in one of the GEOSS working groups that is also working with the SRTM DEM and with the ASTER DEM. The TanDEM-X mission was only possible because of a public-private partnership with the industry. Our industry partners paid 30% of the cost of the mission, and DLR the rest. We cannot open the whole DEM to the scientific community on a global basis because otherwise you don’t have a commercial market for the industry. We plan to make available to GEOSS a DEM with reduced pixel resolution but with height accuracy much better than currently available. This is how we have established industry partnerships so that we can do business as well as research and contribute to GEOSS.

Alberto Moreira flies a German glider (ASW20, 15 m span) over the atlantic mountains in Brazil

Alberto Moreira: Well we need to separate the technical challenges into categories such as lidars, imaging optical sensors, radars, and also microwave radiometers. In all these measurement areas we need to move in the direction of data continuity. Whether we are mapping long-term processes or short term, the measurements will only become reliable if there are data available over long periods. Radars, for example, digital beam forming represents the future technology, allowing a much better performance, swath width and resolution than existing systems. Microwave radiometers are moving towards the concept of synthetic aperture. The optical, high resolution, and several hyperspectral sensors are just coming out with an incredible number of bands.

One most important part is that these technologies must become affordable – remote sensing must be affordable. The cost of the satellites must become cheaper. We have good examples from Europe over the last few years where the industry makes offers much below the cost cap set by the funding agency. This is a revolution and I hope that in this way we can afford these new technological developments. We need solutions where the next generation of technology has a heritage from the past. We need a road map for 20 years ahead, so we can plan the heritage from one technology to another without big jumps that are usually associated with high risks and costs. Then technology development becomes affordable.

Earthzine: ESA just recently hosted the Living Planet Symposium. Do you view the Earth as a living entity?

Alberto Moreira: The Earth is dynamic. Every minute, every second something is changing on the Earth. Human beings make the Earth much more dynamic. This is a challenge because Earth’s processes are rather complicated and they interact with each other in ways we do not understand. One big challenge is to guarantee that we have sustainable development. The Earth is so fragile that if we don’t care, future generations will have less chance for a better life than we have. And this we cannot afford. Sustainable development is an agreement between countries, every nation has a responsibility to make sure that they are taking care of the water resources. Every individual has this responsibility. This is a living Earth. We have a responsibility to leave the Earth in at least as good of condition as it is today.

Alberto Moreira
IEEE-GRSS President,
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Microwaves and Radar Institute
P.O. Box 1116
82230 Wessling/Oberpfaffenhofen
GERMANY
Phone: + 49 8153 28 2305/2306 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              + 49 8153 28 2305/2306      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Fax: + 49 8153 28 1135
Email: alberto.moreira@dlr.de

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.

Dr. Roy Gibson

Mr. Gibson served as the first Director General of the European Space Agency from 1975-80 and the first Director General of the British National Space Centre from 1985-1987.This editorial is adapted from his keynote speech at the GEO-IGOS Symposium in Washington DC on 19 November 2009. Reprinted from GEO News Issue #7, 19 February 2010.

Read Dr. Roy Gibson’s biography here.

Following last year’s decision by the Integrated Global Observing Strategy Partnership (IGOS-P) to merge its Themes into GEO, it is clear that GEO and its GEOSS must now be regarded as the authentic way ahead for Earth observation. We have neither the time nor the resources to encourage competitors. However, GEO will need to make changes to be worthy of such trust.

The Washington Summit

Calling the Earth Observation Summit in Washington at the end of July, 2003 must have required considerable courage. The atmosphere in administration circles in Washington, at least as perceived from afar, was not at all favorable to an initiative in this field. That it led immediately to the creation of the Group on Earth Observation was a tribute to a few who really put their reputations on the line. We must be grateful to them.

The participants at the Washington meeting were a mixed bunch: there were ministers and senior civil servants from a broad spread of nations, plus the European Commission and international organizations both of the United Nations family and others, such as the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) and IGOS-P. The US Chairman, and he naturally had the determining voice, was wholeheartedly in favor of welcoming everyone and anyone willing to participate in GEO.

I understand this attitude, but in retrospect I believe it made it difficult for GEO to deliver what most of its originators wanted: strong political leadership. From the start the majority of civil servants pressed for strict economy in the budget, and GEO became financially solvent only thanks to quite substantial donations made by a relatively small number of founding participants. There was no question of GEO having a budget able to undertake work to fill identified gaps. Indeed, I had the feeling that the Secretariat and its Director were being ring-fenced before they had even started work.

There is no doubt that GEO can point to some successes, and we can only admire the devotion of the Director of the Secretariat and his staff (mainly seconded from space agencies). But frankly, I don’t think we are all that much nearer the “system of systems” than we were a few years ago. The creation of GEO was intended to kick-start the effort to develop a global observation system of systems, but the concrete results from the many GEO meetings – even those at ministerial level – have been disappointing, at least to me.

Money talks

One fundamental reason for this, in my opinion at least, is the lack of direct financing. The Secretariat has been obliged to construct a Work Plan from tasks for which there are volunteers willing to undertake work and bear the cost. The original idea, however, was that GEO would seek to develop an agreed set of requirements and would then fund, or aid in financing, those tasks where an appropriate volunteer was not immediately apparent.

This does not seem to have happened. For example, it pains me at present to see how the vital ECVs – the Essential Climate Variables – are so patchily tackled, when GEO Participants continue to find money for projects which might be delayed a few years without much suffering. To me it doesn’t really matter who does it, but the ECVs must be tackled, one by one, and with vigor. At the moment there is more cackle than tackle. We need coordinated and sustained measurements for each of the ECVs.

Similarly, the transition from research to operational programmes just does not have any GEO financing apart from what participants are willing to provide – generally in kind rather than in cash. How many times have we furtively calculated the cost of a meeting, compared to the size of the GEO budget?

The Secretariat, already limited in numbers, has also been burdened with the task of servicing a committee structure which must be the envy of many bureaucrats. No doubt the mechanism is becoming more performant compared with the early days when the “open house” policy led to committees with five, six or more volunteer chairmen. But the damage has already been done. Because of the rather cumbersome way in which GEO has been developing, many stakeholders are already resigned to using it to promote their own agendas, rather than attempt to challenge the way things are organized within GEO.

This is noticeable at the level of governments, of space agencies, of international organizations and even scientific groups. Many have seen GEO as a good justification for receiving funding for activities the prime purpose of which is not building GEOSS. But this secondary effect may only be temporary, because there are signs of “GEO fatigue” setting in among both Members and Participating Organizations. There is a noticeable reduction in the rank and standing of governmental representatives at the GEO and ministerial meetings, and a certain reticence on the part of former big players when volunteers are being sought.

Participants in the first International Earth Observation Summit

I realize that a lot of work is being put into GEO and that the account I am giving sounds churlish and may indeed be somewhat exaggerated. If this is indeed the case, I will be very happy. However, I feel sufficiently sure that things could and should be improved to burden the GEO community with my worries. GEO can be put back on the right track, but only if participants (principally the governmental representatives) are willing to untie its hands and give it adequate funding and more recognition and status. GEO needs to be linked more directly to the political institutions that are responsible for making, so to say, “global decisions” on the environment, and particularly on climate change.

Political mandates

The Societal Benefit Areas, which were defined for GEO soon after its inception, show the breadth of the original ambition, but they also point to the need of functional linkage with political institutions with responsibilities in these areas. By “political institutions”, I mean those which have been created by treaty, or at least have equivalent teeth. We have enough experience in other fields where satellite observations are crucial – for example, nuclear proliferation – to see that best-efforts institutions can never deliver the necessary clout to implement what may in some areas be unpopular measures, and still less to ensure compliance.

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from Europe – occasionally Europe gets it right. More years ago than I like to count, the notion of a European programme for Global Monitoring of the Environment and Security (GMES) was floated. For some time it was more talk than action – though it may be that its supposed existence helped to prompt the US initiative to call the 2003 Summit.

Slowly, and not without difficulty, the GMES programme has started to take shape. The European Commission is providing the funds and defining the requirements. The European Space Agency has been given a clear role, and there is an appropriate role for EUMETSAT. Let me be clear – I am not vaunting the specific contents of the GMES programme, although I believe that it has much more merit than earlier attempts and clearly the resulting observations will make a significant contribution to GEOSS. I am simply pointing to the methodology. The GMES requirements are being defined by an entity which has the money to fund the necessary observations, and the space agencies (funded largely by the same governments) know what they have to contribute and what they have to achieve.

This is a trick much easier to perform regionally than globally, but – in my view – the same basic rules apply. GMES has the necessary coherence to be a success, although we still have to be convinced that the European Commission can continue over the years to find the necessary funding to ensure continuity. Unless it can be made into a legal requirement, the replacement satellites will have to compete every few years with other apparently equally worthy causes.

Earth observation is of course only one element in the complex problematic of climate change, and the tail should not try to wag the dog. Success will in my opinion only come when the political deciders clearly designate responsibilities. We still have too many actors and would-be actors on the stage. If the UNFCCC manages to reach some measure of international agreement, it would be wise for them also to spend some time defining the best way to articulate Earth observation efforts, both in the provision of the necessary data on a continuing basis, as well as in helping to ensure compliance of commitments.

Even independent experts tend to underestimate the complexity of the observation component. A respected French commentator recently published a list of immediate actions which the climate negotiations need to take. Near the top of his list was “The rapid deployment of a network of satellites capable of precisely measuring the level of emissions in each country.” I certainly would not want to argue with the objective, but it will come to nothing – or very little – unless time is spent on setting up an agreed mechanism and funding.

There is no doubt that GEO can play a major role in all this. It could be strengthened, and hopefully Member States could overcome their horror at the idea of a strong GEO Secretariat. Then we could perhaps begin to make some real progress. Funding through GEO might, for example, make it easier to use the product of commercial Earth observation satellites. They could be particularly useful in helping to ensure compliance by providing an impartial verification of national statistics.

Once governments agree to a plan of action which is enshrined in a formally recognised legal document, they will all be expected to instruct their delegations to the various international bodies to act in ways consistent with the basic international political agreement. Space agency governing bodies and the UN family of international organisations would all be expected to act in support of the agreed plan. This is not by any means the case at present, because there is not always a direct link between top governmental agreements and the numerous subordinate bodies, each of which seeks to increase its mandate (or to limit damage by stonewalling) – not always for the benefit of the common cause.

There are a lot of “ifs” in this scenario, but, again, if our political masters decide to be really serious about tackling climate change, then it must be done at all levels. The word will need to be spread to ministries, agencies, and representatives in the governing bodies of international organisations so that we are all singing more or less the same tune. Resources are scarce and essential contributions to the fight must be given priority over other activities – even, perhaps over national egos. The task is manifestly too big for any single country or international organisation to undertake alone – real coordination and collaboration should be the name of the game. But we
badly need a champion to make this change.

While we are waiting for this illumination (and probably afterwards, too), we must continue to try to make progress by exploiting to the full such capabilities as we have, relying on informal networks as much as institutions. I fully realise the value of this “progress by stealth and by personal relations”, but the successes it can bring us should not be allowed to obscure the basic need to tighten up the institutional framework.

This brings me to say a final word about the vital role of the individuals who are involved in all this. Much of what I have said referred to organisations, bodies, agencies and institutions – but within each of them are people, individuals. Each is no doubt bound by loyalty to work for the good of the parent organisation, but there are ways of reconciling this duty with the wider duty not to get in the way of the greater common good. Or, to express it clearly: to do one’s personal best not to allow the main international priorities to be delayed or even sabotaged by the short-term ambitions of the individual organisation, government or agency. Each of us has a responsibility to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

Read about Dr. Roy Gibson here.

Dr. Mjwara (2nd from right) describing new developments in South Africa to Ellsworth LeDrew, Val Munsami, and Jay Pearlman (left to right).

This interview was originally conducted in Fall 2009 and posted on Oct. 20, 2009.

Dr. Philemon Mjwara is Director General of South Africa’s Department of Science and Technology, responsible for developing South Africa’s science and technology policy, managing the country’s government laboratories, and implementing a new 10-year innovation strategy. He is also one of the co-chairs for the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations, and a champion of the role of developing nations in building a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) to multiply the accessibility and value of data on everything from natural resources to weather.

Dr Mjwara was already making his mark on the South African R&D scene when he arrived at the Department of Science and Technology in 2006. He taught science policy at the University of Pretoria before becoming a practising innovation manager in 2001 with his appointment as director of a newly created National Laser Centre, where he united three disparate laser research units. Within two years the organization had multiplied its cadre of doctoral students from 10 to 50, and developed a collaborative network that links comparable laser centres across Africa.

In 2005, Dr. Mjwara was elected group executive for research and development at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

Earthzine contributor Peter Fairley reached Dr. Mjwara last month by telephone at his office in Pretoria, just days after the South African-designed-and-built Sumbandila satellite rose into space from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The 81-kg Earth observation satellite – South Africa’s second – was designed and built by Stellenbosch, SA-based microsatellite firm SunSpace & Information Systems. Its primary payload is a multispectral imager – that is, the imager has a resolution of 6.25 m x 6.25 m which is more than four times better than South Africa’s first satellite, SunSat, placed in orbit a decade ago.

Earthzine: Building local capacity for science and technology has been a big part of your educational efforts. What were you thinking at Baikonur as you watched SumbandilaSat – your country’s second satellite – rocket into the sky?

Dr. Mjwara: It was an exciting moment. To actually see the rocket lifting off and to know that it carried a satellite manufactured in South Africa. Of course it’s spectacular when you see the flames, because they do this at night and it lights up the sky. But you’re still nervous, because you never know whether the satellite will be released from the rocket safely. Since the launch, we’ve been able to establish communications with the satellite, to stabilize it, and to ensure that the camera is pointing down and the solar panels are facing the sun. So I think so far so good.

Earthzine: What will Sumbandila do for South Africa?

Dr. Mjwara: I can respond to this at three levels because we have a number of payloads onboard. There’s a communications satellite which will enable school kids and the amateur radio association in South Africa to communicate, say, between villages. That’s just to excite awareness about satellite communications. There are two experiments, one looking at the forces exerted on a vibrating string that will inform design of next-generation satellites, and a second to see whether we can pick up climate change-induced shifts in lightning activity.

Most importantly, of course, is Sumbandila’s camera. That will provide us with pictures with a resolution of approximately 6.2 meters. This is very important for us for a variety of Earth observation products that we need in South Africa, such as crop yield monitoring for farmers, tracking land use changes, or identifying the optimal sites for building, transportation, etc. And we can do hydrological monitoring. You know South Africa is not adequately endowed with water resources, so we need to start mapping water to educate the country on what we need to do in the future. Hopefully, the next time we talk we’ll be able to tell you how far along we are with these applications!

SumbandilaSat in Baikonur during integration.

Earthzine: At least some of that imagery is available from commercial satellites. Why develop your own?

Dr. Mjwara: There are multipronged reasons why we want to have this capability. First, the government can achieve huge savings by not continuously buying licenses for the use of this imagery. Building this satellite cost about 26 million Rand, maybe 30 million Rand including the launch, which is about US$4 million. A multiuser satellite imagery license from commercial vendors costs around 10 million Rand. So over a period of three years this satellite will be paid off. And then we’re not losing foreign exchange. A related point is that South Africa has a capability for satellite engineering that it inherited from pre-1994 and we wanted to revive and utilize this capacity. We can use that capacity to develop monitoring devices with even higher resolution than 6.25 meters.

The other reason, of course, is that we can direct the satellite to respond to our needs. If you get a disaster in a particular area, say floods that will be developing over 24 hours or 36 hours, and you need monitoring to direct evacuations, you can direct your satellite to focus in on that area each time it passes over.

Earthzine: South Africa is creating a space agency. What is its charter and what will be the benefits to South Africa?

Dr. Mjwara: We already have, for example, a telemetry and tracking center and an assembly capability at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Satellite Application Centre at Hartebeesthoek, north-west of Johannesburg. And we have other private sector partners that are working with space. The space agency will consolidate these activities and begin to implement on three strategic areas we have identified for space: safety and security, the environment and monitoring, and innovation and economic development. We may even play an important role in launch capability.

Earthzine: Let’s now look beyond space, so to speak. Sumbandila means “lead the way” in the Venda language. Where do you see your efforts to improve science research and technology taking South Africa?

Dr. Mjwara: The South African system of innovation, its excellent universities, science councils and private sector players, has focused on basic research. What we’ve not done extremely well is to link research done at the universities with the needs of industry. In the next ten years we hope to bridge that gap. For instance, an initiative with the universities is going to emphasize the management of intellectual property, supported by a new technology innovation agency to help institutions commercialize their research.

Dr. Philemon Mjwara

We are also setting up centers of competence to work closely with industry and to identify new high-tech industries we can set up with our research. We would like some of the knowledge that comes from the universities to be useful, to grow sectors of the economy. We are working with the National Department of Agriculture to see what value we can add in agriculture for the next generation, and with the Department of Minerals and Energy to see which of South Africa’s natural resources can be activated to create jobs and get foreign exchange.

There is also a range of social challenges that can be addressed by science and technology innovation. We have programs marrying institutional research to the social problems we face. Broadly, we are preparing the country for future challenges and to become a knowledge-based economy.

Earthzine: Is it a challenge retaining top students and scientists for that knowledge economy?

Dr. Mjwara: Yes, and we’re addressing it with what we call “flagship” projects. To give you a flavor for these projects, consider South Africa’s bid to host the international Square Kilometer Array project, a giant array of radio signal receivers that will seek to understand the origins of the universe. We’re building a prototype telescope for which there is no off-the-shelf hardware and software to handle the large amount of data that will be received. Then there’s the Sumbandila satellite. By having these high flagship projects where the innovation is at the cutting edge, we’re able to excite and retain youngsters and to attract ex-South Africans to come back.

Earthzine: Of course, it only makes sense for countries to collaborate where possible to make the best use of limited resources. Is the international collaboration inherent in GEOSS already having an impact, both on your Earth observation plans and on the ground in terms of policymaking and adaptation to a changing climate?

Dr. Mjwara: Certainly. Under the South African Earth Observation Strategy – our response to the GEOSS process – we’re looking at how to combine in-situ and satellite data to understand the impact of climate changes within the southern African region. That inspired us to develop our Grand Challenge Climate Change, where we examined how we could use our geographic advantages to make measurements that will contribute to the global understanding of climate change. One conclusion was that the juncture of the cold South Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean off South Africa near Cape Agulhas can be an excellent laboratory for studying the interactions of oceans and the atmospheric convection currents that result. Science missions for our next generation of satellites could study those. We are also discussing a possible geostationary satellite over Africa.

Earthzine: Such specialization works if there is open sharing of data. You have called technology transfer among nations one of two major cross-cutting issues facing international negotiators in the run up to the Copenhagen conference on climate change scheduled for December. What about international promises to share Earth observation data? Is that rhetoric or reality today?

Dr. Mjwara: We really have seen a number of countries making data available to developing countries and to Africa in particular. The partnership between China and Brazil is making data from their China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite available to Africa. We have upgraded a ground station in South Africa to download that data. We have Landsat data from the US Geological Survey made available free of charge for our scientific work on climate change, including historic data for tracking changes that have already taken place. And Japan and other partners are providing digital elevation data to track changes in elevation as a result of climate change. This is all part of creating GEOSS. This is becoming a reality. GEO is also developing a data-sharing policy which would establish an agreed set of criteria for making data available.

Earthzine: How successful has GEO been to date in mobilizing resources for developing nations broadly, and what is the toughest nut to crack to really make that a reality?

Dr. Mjwara: To be honest with you, the developed nations have made some significant contributions. For instance there is a program for tracking meningitis outbreaks, which spread during dry conditions, and many, many others. And with each there are dedicated attempts to ensure that knowledge for the technology employed is transferred to specific people in developing countries. Under GEOSS, experts are giving capacity-building workshops, and some money is provided for local people to really get their hands dirty. So maybe the funds are not as many or as much as we would like them to be, but at least there have been real attempts to establish relationships between developed and developing countries.

Earthzine: Can you describe your department’s effort to translate Earth observation and climate projections into a language of risk that will assist decision-makers?

SumbandilaSat during Thermal Vacuum Testing at ISSA facility at Houwteq

Dr. Mjwara: This is a legacy initiative. What we discovered was that local governments have absolutely no useful information for responding to disasters. The Risk and Vulnerability Atlas will be a single point of entry for all information and advisories to policy makers, providing access to information on the impacts of climate change in their region. Our vision is that scientists will look at areas that are going to be vulnerable to changes in climate and then would use hard copy publications and the electronic atlas to illustrate the most vulnerable areas. People at the local level could then identify potential risks and take the necessary steps to deal with that. An agricultural area that’s going to be hit with drought because of climate change, for example, could respond by favoring certain crops or by protecting land that will become more attractive for agriculture.

Earthzine: Are you saying that there will be a web portal allowing someone in a local planning office to input their postal code and get a read out that shows them the most serious threats for their area?

Dr. Mjwara: Absolutely. But there would also be people behind the web portal updating the information and making sure it’s accessible.

Earthzine: What is your perspective on where we stand in trying to slow or stop human induced climate change? UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said last week that “the world’s glaciers are now melting faster than human progress to protect them.” How concerned are you as to whether something will come out of Copenhagen? What action would you like to see from the US or Europe?

Dr. Mjwara: Look, I am not hopeful that we will have major breakthroughs in terms of the major developed nations pronouncing on the binding targets required to reduce the 2 C rise in global temperature that we foresee. I do think China will probably have some targets. But I also see a very strong voice from developing nations demanding action from developed nations, and giving developing countries the space they need to grow.

Earthzine: Must climate change more drastically to convince some in developed nations – I’m thinking of the US Congress here – that serious measures are in order?

Dr. Mjwara: It’s not that people don’t see the need. It’s the reality of what it means for the current economies. And, to be frank, to also buy enough time to develop the technologies that are going to be needed to shift away from the major contributors of greenhouse gasses. To reduce the carbon footprint from cars, you need to allow time and space to develop alternatives such as electric batteries and hybrids and hydrogen cars. That’s not going to happen overnight. Imagine the investment that has gone to cars with internal combustion engines.

I think that’s the driver of the positions taken by developed nations. The effects of climate change are being felt now. The question is when do you start reducing emissions and what is a realistic time? There’s a pragmatism here that people don’t normally talk about.

Earthzine: Can you imagine developing nations—led by an entrepreneurial China—emerging as the leader of this pragmatic renewal process?

Dr. Mjwara: Yes, I think so. The developing nations have an opportunity in the development of technology because they don’t have the sunken infrastructure investments that they have to worry about recouping. We certainly have sunlight in South Africa, which presents us with an opportunity to invest huge money in research for the next generation of thin-film photovoltaics for solar panels. Without huge investments in the internal combustion engine we have an opportunity, perhaps, to develop electric vehicles or fuel cells. I do think that the Chinese may find themselves in that mode of thinking where they say ‘we could have self-imposed targets because we probably don’t have to follow the same route that the developed countries took.’

Earthzine: That’s a hopeful note to end on. Thank you very much for taking this time out of your afternoon to talk to Earthzine.

SSIT President Janet Rochester

Today, having retired from that career in 2004, she can retrace the steps she took from the U.K. to the U.S.A., from botanical abstracts and indexes to technical writing for defense engineers, and from reading the futuristic imaginations of Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke, to leading the SSIT as it considers the implications for humanity and on the planet of engineers, engineering, and the engineered.

Her career path

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in science from the Chelsea College of Technology, University of London, she taught chemistry. Then her former husband (she is now married to Haydon Rochester) was offered a 3-year contract working in New Jersey, and they said, “Why not give it a go.”

But she found her career opportunities in botany as limited here as in England, so she built a bridge to make the crossover from botany to technical writing by earning one of the first master’s degrees in Science and Technical Communication offered by Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She would later earn an MBA from Monmouth College (now Monmouth University).

When a neighbor told her about a technical writer’s job opening up at what was then RCA in Moorestown, NJ, she applied and was hired. “I joined a large technical writing group that worked with the engineering groups to literally get the specifications written to the specifications. This was work for the Aegis radar system sensor radar used to scan the skies and installed on a series of cruisers and destroyers for the US Navy. We wrote in a particular style to meet certain military standards and our job was to make sure the engineers wrote to that particular style and to make sure any changes to the specifications were incorporated, and we saw the documents through publication.”

The Aegis Combat System at work (U.S Dept. of Defense photo)- The guided missile cruiser USS Thomas S. Gates (CG 51), center, underway alongside the Chilean frigate Williams (FF 19) and Peruvian frigate Carvajal (FM 51) in the Pacific Ocean (July 11, 2005). Thomas S. Gates is part of a multinational naval and coast guard force from six nations conducting UNITAS 46-05 Pacific Phase off the coasts of Colombia. During the two-week exercise, participating units have the opportunity to train as a unified force in all aspects of naval operations, from maritime interdiction to anti-submarine and electronic warfare.

Membership in IEEE and SSIT Reflects Many Interests

Her professional transformation had prompted her to join IEEE in 1983, and also SSIT, “one of the smaller” of the Institute’s 38 societies, “with a history of examining and calling attention to social, environmental, economic, political, and other global impacts of engineers’ work. SSIT also supports and participates in work related to the history of technology, women in engineering, engineering education, and engineering ethics,” she reports.

She became president of SSIT in 2008 and is finishing her second one-year term.

“Our members are engineers – and others (of all IEEE technical societies we are perhaps the most interdisciplinary) – interested in the social impacts of technology. That concept covers wide ground, and our members interests include but are not limited to: engineering ethics, public policy issues related to technology and engineering, sustainable design, sustainable energy, climate change and other environmental issues, emerging technologies, green technologies, health and healthcare technologies and impacts, public transport, technologies for international development, standards and regulations, telecommunications and privacy issues, and energy issues,” she said.

A survey of the conferences, magazine articles, and blog entries shows an eclectic and thoughtful span of interests. On the SSIT blog at present are ongoing discussions on Ethical Robots in War, e-mail vs. personal letters, nanotechnology, and What is Predictive Fiction?

“I am interested in what technology can do and what it can’t,” she says. “People often think of a technological solution when some other solution might be more applicable. I think technology can become a force in that people come to think of it as the most important thing. Technology isn’t neutral. It depends on the culture and the society to determine where it ends up. Different cultures have used the same technology for different purposes. For instance, the Chinese invented gunpowder and all they used it for was fireworks!”

“In the 1980s or even the 1970s, IEEE introduced members to the concept that engineers need to develop their non-technical skills,” Rochester said. “Now we’re at another turning point. We acknowledge that we have a wider social responsibility. We can’t keep doing higher and higher tech that impacts fewer and fewer people. The developments in technology need to be shared with everyone who wants them. And I think this is another change in how we see engineering.

The Blue Marble - East

“We are focusing on the ethical responsibilities of engineers. Our founders were very concerned about the nuclear industry. There is a core of people who are still concerned. I worked in the defense industry. Some people have problems with that or some aspects of it.

“Keith Rainey (a past president of the IEEE GRSS who served as the Geosciences and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) representative to SSIT) says we are being more cautious.” She agrees with him. “We’re looking at a more holistic view of technology and society. GRSS may be concerned with how remote sensing information can be used; SSIT may be more concerned about how it can be misused. When satellites are used to track refugees to bring humanitarian help to them, but militaries can use the same information to continue their harassment, we need to think hard about the implications of this technology. On a more individual scale, can (remote sensing technology) be used to track people? We’ve been hearing lately about the new drivers licenses. The stripe on the license stores your personal information that can be used to speed up border crossings between, say, Canada and the US. The two countries and the Border States, primarily, are going through with this technology. But critics have pointed out that this information doesn’t stay private. The time saved is minimal. And when you walk down Main Street someone with one of these reader devices can see everything about you. So you have to buy a metal device to stick your license in.”

She continued: “SSIT isn’t saying we shouldn’t develop this technology, we’re saying, hey, hold on a minute; let’s consider all the implications. There are other factors going on here. We need to make sure these things are secure. So, we’re being more cautious. This may contribute to our reputation for being anti technology, but I think it goes back to the original idea of developing technology appropriate for its purpose. Technology is supposed to solve problems; not create new ones. For example, if your identity is stolen, it is time consuming and expensive to fix it. It all falls back on the individual. We are going to be trying to bring these issues to a wider audience.

“We’re looking at a bigger picture, a more holistic view of technology. For those who are interested it is intellectually stimulating and mind expanding. We recently conducted a survey of members to gauge their interests. At the top of their interests are sustainability, renewable energy, and capacity building in developing countries. Our members also reported on their concern about population growth; that there is no problem we are facing that will not be exacerbated by population growth.

“We are now in discussion with the ICEO (IEEE Committee on Earth Observation) about an SSIT member joining this committee.”

She sees opportunities and challenges ahead for IEEE. “Within IEEE, we see more growth in membership outside the US than within the US. More countries are educating their own engineers to work in their countries, but they also see the relevance of joining an international organization. The entre into engineering is changing. I’ve heard professors complain that people don’t have the tinkering skills that previous generations have had, because they haven’t taken anything apart–so little is mechanical now. So they need training in model building before they do any serious engineering. But I am sure it is equally true that when some people see what computers can do, they are wowed and think, ‘I want to do that’.”

In May of this year, SSIT held a collocated conference with The Computer Society‘s Technical Committee on Sustainable Systems and Technology. Jim Isaak, the 2010 president of the Computer Society, is also a board member of SSIT, an author of Predictive Fiction, and an SSIT blogger.

The Blue Marble - West

Earth’s Future as a Home Planet Depends on World Leadership

“I think I’m a pessimist,” Janet Rochester said. “I don’t see people as a whole coming to grips with the problems that face humanity.”

She doesn’t hold out much hope for dramatic changes at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on Dec. 7 – 18, 2009.

“I’m not optimistic that much is going to change,” she said. “World leaders have to show greater awareness of climate change, greater leadership. People in industry talk about increased costs, and people talk about changes to their lifestyles. But there will be increased costs if we don’t make any changes.

“I do not think the US is moving fast enough about climate change. As a result, I think we are going to lose our technological advantage and play catch up to countries like China, India and Germany.

“The future does look bleak, but it doesn’t have to. We could still turn it around with scientific and technological leadership. I don’t believe we can make climate change go away, but we can mitigate its impact.”

If you would like to join the Society on Social Implications of Technology, contact Janet Rochester at jrochester@ieee.org Not yet a member of IEEE? Click here.

Maeve Hickok is managing editor of Earthzine.

Bal Ram Singh, Ph.D.

Bal Ram Singh, Ph.D., 51, once a child of the village and now a successful biophysical chemist at a U.S. university (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth) and director of its Center for Indic Studies, built the school himself without government assistance. Deeply engaged as a Hindu, a family man, a professor, research scientist, and a U.S. citizen, he is also determined to prove that “one little man” can change the status-quo in India for the better.

India’s population, which is over 1 billion, is second only to China, which it is predicted to pass by 2030. India has 2.4% of the world’s land area, and 15% of the world’s population. Eight percent (8%) of the world’s poor live in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) alone. UP has a population of 170 million – larger than most countries – and 60 million are poor, according to a 2002 World Bank report. Malnutrition, maternal and child mortality, and disease levels are higher in UP than in other states, while immunization and literacy rates are lower.

“According to the 2001 Population Census, literacy increased from 42% in 1991 to 57% as of February 2001, substantial progress but still well below the all-India average of 65%. Female literacy in particular, at 43%, is also below the all-India average of 54%… Uttar Pradesh spends little on elementary education: spending rose from only “1.7% of GSDP in the early 1990s to 1.8% by the end of the decade,” according to The World Bank.

Korown, Singh estimates, has a literacy rate of 30-40%, slightly higher for men than women; and most residents only go through middle school. His late father was educated and a land-owning farmer, but most residents are laborers with yearly incomes of about 2000-3000 rupees or $200-$300 USD.

Painting of the goddess Saraswati

Singh‘s own education came about unexpectedly. His family did not encourage his schooling past middle school because they were farmers, and expected he would join the family business. But he enjoyed school, did well, and was encouraged by his teachers to go on to the next level. He did so “almost by rote,” he recalled, eventually earning his doctorate in the U.S. and becoming an academic research scientist with a specialty in the botulinum neurotoxin. Yet there were no educational options past middle school for his younger sister, and the inequity of her prospects first inspired his resolve to build a school.

Singh, who was interviewed in Massachusetts, chose to build this school originally just for girls out of this personal conviction as well as demographic reality. Education confers respect and respectability, he believes, and when only the men in a family are educated, “the respectability of a family goes down.” He also believes women have to receive education in order to become leaders in their families, their communities and in the broader world of work, politics and the world’s myriad problems. “It’s not enough to educate them; we have to educate them well, so they become leaders.”

So, he built this school in northwestern India on his family’s land, which lies near the small city of Sultanpur. He initially planned to help an education group to set up the school, but they wanted to bring in advisors from the city. As he wanted local control they parted ways and he built the whole school himself. His extended 30-member family also helped and still helps, but they don’t interfere; he has stipulated that no member of his family can be paid for service to the school. Singh decries a pattern of nepotism he has observed in other schools in India.

Ultimately, he set up a non-profit 80G corporation, administered by treasurer Prem Prakash Singh (no relation), who also runs BB Tech, the ayurvedic factory he previously set up to employ people in the village. Bal Ram Singh himself earns no income from the school or from Harbal Products, the ayurvedic business.

Prem Prakash Singh was also raised in rural India and holds a Masters in Information Technology (MIT) degree from Aligarh Muslim University. He writes in an email, “Kuruom Jankalyan Sansthan (the school’s official name) is supported through the North South Foundation in collaboration with Dr. Singh, but we expect to become self sufficient within a year using student fees and other donations locally. Kuruom is a place to learn about real life through ‘punchmukhi siksha‘ [Five-fold Educational Programme]. These days very few persons care about poverty / rural education. Dr.Singh is one who has devoted his time as well as his real worth for all these types of works.”

The board of directors staffed the school with fully-qualified teachers and a principal, and welcomed the students who applied for admission and pay a fee to attend the private school. “There are other rural schools that have been built in the last 5 years, but they are very crowded, and not really up to the mark,” Bal Ram Singh said. “There was a lot of excitement and parents waited until the school opened in July rather than send their children elsewhere.” The school year usually begins in May.

Image of the Kuruom Campus

“Currently the school has both boys and girls, and we plan to have boys and girls until 8^th grade at which point high school classes will be only for girls. This is done to get the school going (with enough beginning students) and due to the pressure from parents, particularly those who had boys and girls both in the family. The school was initially planned as a high school but we added K-8 so that students are trained in our way of education from the beginning,” Bal Ram Singh said.

Construction is not yet complete, but one of two planned wings is open, learning is going on, and the Educomp Solutions Limited.com Smart Class rooms are bringing the newest technology via broadband Internet access to children, many of whom have never used a computer before. Singh’s mission and that of the school is to teach leadership as well as a full curriculum with co-curricular traditional and modern Indian arts, sports, music and dance. It has a holistic pedagogy, much like Saraswati’s, “whose four hands represent four aspects of human personality in learning: mind, intellect, alertness and ego.” He says the curriculum is integrated so that subjects are not taught in isolation—computer instruction incorporates math.

Kuroum vidyalaya is not a religious school per se; although the majority of Indians are Hindu, it welcomes students and hires staff that are Muslim and other faiths. It does, however, follow the Hindu practice of dharma, “a righteous way of being.” Singh said, “In India, we worship all living things… and we don’t expect to receive anything in return but respect… I want students to learn about sustainability, to learn to protect the environment. This is dharma. So, in this respect, the school is religious.”

Singh’s vision for Kuruom vidyalaya is congruent with the UN Millennium Development Goals of 2000 in which world leaders came together and pledged to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty, as well as reach seven other goals set by the United Nations. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are designed to relieve the world’s most pressing problems by 2015, and include halting the spread of HIV/AIDS, providing universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women; and ensuring environmental sustainability. These eight goals represent an unprecedented global partnership, both in size and scope, and have come to symbolize a new age of humanitarianism.

Why Girls’ Education in a Society Thousands of Years Old is Vital

In India the educational status- quo for girls is poor. Singh says the barriers to girls’ education are social and political, not cultural. Women in India have always been worshipped through powerful deities, even if mortal women were socially subservient to men. Modern women are able to hold positions of power if they have wealthy families who support them with education and influence (e.g. PM Indira Gandhi), or if they are able to independently obtain education, which is more available in the cities. Socially, however, most rural Indian parents are conservative: they want to marry their daughters, not send them away to cities for educations in facilities not equipped for their safety or even with girls’ toilets. This is a kind of de-facto discrimination that the Indian government says it is striving to correct.

Map of Uttar Pradesh

“Growth in access to schooling has been matched by a steady increase in enrolment with the most dramatic upswing since 1990s in girls’ participation levels. From 13.8 million boys and 5.4 million girls enrolled at the primary level in 1950-51, the number rose to 69.7 million boys and 61.1 million girls in 2004-05. At the upper primary level, the enrolment increased from 2.6 million boys and 0.5 million girls to 28.5 million boys and 22.7 million girls,” according to the Ministry of Human Resources Development Department of Education & Literacy (2008).

But Singh sees a more troubling dichotomy. “I think it is a mistake to focus on girls versus boys. It is more important to distinguish between those who are well-to-do and those who are not.”

Rural Reality v. Big City Allure in One of the World’s Fastest Growing Economies

The vast majority of India’s one billion population lives in its 550,000 villages and outlying rural areas, not in its 200 cities, which are densely populated, nonetheless. Agriculture is the basis of the rural economy in Uttar Pradesh, but most employment is in low-wage, intermittent labor for men and boys. That fragile economic safety net doesn’t exist at all for women and girls without male breadwinners, as well as for the ill and disabled, and those perceived to have low social or caste identity, according to The World Bank.

Many move to the city: “Urban poverty has a distinctly different face than rural poverty. Many of the urban poor included in the consultations were first generation migrants, and the majority felt that migration had improved their economic position. In urban areas, unlike rural villages, employment opportunities – if only scavenging, petty hawking, and begging – are available year round, typically at higher wages than paid in rural areas…,” The World Bank reports.

Yet India, despite a worldwide recession, has the second fastest growing economy in the world today and an educated middle class increasing its prosperity. A March 2009 editorial in India’s Economic Times titled “Focus on the Rural Economic Base” argues that India has to expand its economic support to its rural population:

“Unlike China, where exports and manufacturing sector have been the main engines of economic growth, India’s growth has been stimulated by the emergence and rise of an educated middle class who have prospered in the services sector. The share of the services sector in GDP has increased to 58% and it is often said that the performance of this sector has become independent of the performance of other sectors of the economy. This argument will be put to the test during the current slowdown…

“Even in the last quarter of 2008, consumer spending and retail sales in China and India did not witness a significant decline. Much of the prosperity in India has been starkly visible in the top 20 cities of India. A look at the earnings structure across India’s top 20 cities reveals that the average graduate earns Rs 1.8 lakh per year compared to just Rs 91,000 in rural areas…”

However, The Wall Street Journal’s India Edition reports, “India started from a lower economic base but has made greater gains: Its urban-rural income gap has slowly but steadily declined since the early 1990s. Over the past decade, economic growth in rural India has outpaced growth in urban areas by almost 40%. Rural India now accounts for half of the country’s GDP, up from 46% in 1993. Unlike the Chinese, rural Indians do not have to migrate to already crowded urban areas to earn a better living.”

India is complex and many layered.

Bal Ram Singh’s View of India Post Independence from Great Britain on August 15, 1947

“I think India is doing very well in some sense, and very badly in others. In 60 years they have proven that they can live democratically at the local level and certainly at the national level. It is a multicultural society. The people are Muslim, Christian, Hindu and other groups and they all live together. This has been very successful. Economically, India has capitalized on technology: computer technology, nuclear technology, with satellites and so on. Socially, it has not done so well. They have not been able to use India’s experience over a long period of time to develop the rural areas where they could have significant impact on people’s lives through education, through economic development. All this has not happened. There has been a dichotomy between the cities and the rural areas in India. And people have adopted a way of living that is mostly westernized, which is not possible in my opinion…India has  not done very well integrating our culture with the modern way of life where they allow people to be educated, to be creative, to be innovative, but to not move to the cities. The movie Slumdog Millionaire shows what can happen when people move from rural areas to the cities without education or the capacity for modern life—they create slums. Those of us who have moved to the West can look back with some objectivity. That is some of my motivation.”

Earthzine opens an occasional series sponsored by the IEEE Foundation on IEEE Fellows with this Featured Person interview with Josiane Zerubia, who was elevated to Fellow in 2003. IEEE Fellows are “an elite global group with international recognition [who] are called upon for guidance and leadership as the world of electrical and electronic technology, continues to evolve.” Please enjoy La Vie de Josiane Zerubia: A Modern Woman of Science.

Paul E. Racette, D Sc

Editor-in-Chief

Josiane Bernadette Zerubia in Chanel frames © INRIA / Photo C. Lebedinsky

Josiane Zerubia, 51, a director of research at INRIA, the premiere French public research institute in applied mathematics and computer science, was taught at an early age by her mother Jeanne and grandmother Louise in Cannes that she could do whatever she wanted if she worked hard enough. Her mother, a hotel maid, and her suffragette grandmother, also taught her that being a girl from a poor family was not only no obstacle, it neither defined her persona nor limited her potential. “If you want to do it and work hard, you can do it – that’s how I was raised.”

In conversation from INRIA in Sophia Antipolis on the French Riviera, where the temperature in early July was as hot (32 Celsius), dry and windy as in August, she shows no sign of having forgotten that lesson.

She allowed that she needed water to drink before our interview and to the lack of air-conditioning at INRIA, but without complaint. She spoke quickly, with assurance, and in lightly accented English. That, in fact, was her only lament: she believes her fluid American English polished during her days in California has diminished because she now speaks mostly French or Pidgin English with her polyglot 25-member research group.

Her career trajectory really began at 10 years of age on a family trip to Paris when she heard a lecture on the atom at the Palais de la Decouverte, and discovered she wanted to be a researcher in physics. This aspiration continued through her high school studies of mathematics, physics, Latin, English, German and the humanities, until she got to her preparatory studies for the French “Grandes Écoles” (top ranking engineering schools) in Toulon. Although she was accepted to one of the best schools in physics and chemistry (ESPCI in Paris), she decided not to go because she quickly understood that it was necessary either to be truly exceptional, to do something original in theoretical physics, or to be very patient, to obtain results in experimental physics. She wanted results more quickly, so she switched direction to electrical engineering research at INPG in Grenoble. Having grown up without much money, her ambitions were very practical: She wanted to do research in an American company, because she thought they would be “more dynamic” than academia, and she also wanted to earn a good salary to buy a car, a TV, “basic things.”

After finishing her “Grande École” studies, she worked first for Hewlett Packard in Grenoble, even though she does not enjoy cold and snow. She found the work very challenging. “It was the early eighties, and the research lab where I worked was brand new. We were competing with IBM and others in the development of speech recognition and user-friendly interfaces for telecommunications.” She continued that work at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, where her project leader, a professor, divided his time between HP Labs and Stanford University. He saw her passion for research and offered her a seat in Stanford’s doctoral program. Around the same time, though, HP France asked her to go back to finish the speech recognition project on which she was working (called “Cyrano”), and she decided to return to France. To her great disappointment, a few months later the project was stopped following an agreement between HP and IBM. She decided to leave HP and pursue an academic career.

Back at home by her beloved Mediterranean, she received a grant from the French government to earn her first doctorate, Doctor of Engineering in speech enhancement, from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. She then received an academic and research grant from IBM to earn a second doctorate, a Ph.D. in modeling and estimation for speech and image recognition, from the same institution. After graduation, INRIA awarded her a fellowship to do a post doc abroad. She had several invitations, but chose the Signal and Image Processing Institute of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, both in order to work with an outstanding professor, and because she loves the climate there. LA’s international ambiance was also intellectually stimulating, and she made lasting friendships. She had enjoyed HP Labs in Palo Alto for the same reasons. So, when she joined INRIA in 1989, she chose to work on the Riviera in Sophia Antipolis. “I need the sun,” she said.

INRIA: the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automatic Control

INRIA began in 1967 in the fertile imaginations of a small group of French academics who worked with the government of PM Georges Pompidou to insure that France would play a pioneering role in the computer revolution.

INRIA Sophia Antipolis © INRIA

Today, INRIA, to quote from its website, is “the French national institute for research in computer science and control, operating under the dual authority of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Industry… dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST). The Institute also plays a major role in technology transfer by fostering training through research, diffusion of scientific and technical information, development, as well as providing expert advice and participating in international programs.

“By playing a leading role in the scientific community in the field and being in close contact with industry, INRIA is a major participant in the development of ICST in France. Throughout its eight research centers in Rocquencourt, Rennes, Sophia Antipolis, Grenoble, Nancy, Bordeaux, Lille and Saclay, INRIA has a workforce of 3,800, 2,800 of whom are scientists from INRIA and INRIA’s partner organizations such as CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research), universities and leading engineering schools. They work in 150 research project-teams. Many INRIA researchers are also professors and approximately 1,000 doctoral students work on theses as members of INRIA research project-teams.”

INRIA’s research portfolio is far reaching in breadth and depth, linking basic and applied research with the private sector, and spanning computer science and applied mathematics in projects that range from the development of an artificial retina to prevention of the severe wildfires that plague the French Riviera.

In 1995, Josiane Zerubia was appointed director of research at INRIA, and in 2002 she was appointed director of research, first class,the second woman to achieve that distinction at INRIA.

la Vie a l'INRIA Sophia Antipolis © INRIA

ARIANA from the Greek

In 1998, Zerubia and a friend and colleague Laure Blanc-Feraud, director of research at CNRS, and mother of three children, created a research project-team. They named it “Ariana“, after the Greek goddess who fought the Minotaur. They had known each other since the 80s when they were in the same doctoral program, but had spent the next ten years working separately. When they were once again working in the same area, they said, “Voila! We did our Ph.D.s together, why don’t we create a group?” They purposely chose a female name, Zerubia said, because they wanted a powerful and inspirational female symbol. As it happened, their first hire was a female Ph.D. student, but now, eleven years later, their research group includes men and women from more than a dozen countries.

She said that one of the important aspects of this research group, which is a partnership between INRIA,CNRS, and the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, is that the researchers put aside any historical or political differences they may have arrived with to work together as scientists, and in so doing they become friends.

It is an explicit part of her (and INRIA’s) mission to welcome scientists and students from all over the world. The French Riviera is a beautiful place to live, play (beaches, cinema, culture, skiing!) and work. The dividends go both ways: Ariana researchers currently collaborate on projects with Israel, the Maghrib, the U.S., Russia, Belarus, China, India, and Europe. As a whole, INRIA’s partnerships spread even further.

Her colleague, Renaud Marlet, Ph.D., associate research scientist at INRIA, in the SIGNES group in Bordeaux, describes her so: “On a professional point of view, I would stress her enthusiasm. I often picture Josiane as I saw her many times giving talks: she is so involved in what she presents that she kind of vibrates and her feet really seem not to touch the ground — half inch in the air out of pure inner energy. She also is a leader, able to federate people with mixed personalities.”

Automatic counting of flamingos in an aerial image. © INRIA/ARIANA (inset) and © Tour du Valat (aerial view)

Zerubia does not consider herself a role model for other women just because she has succeeded in a scientific environment largely populated by men. She does not believe in a quota system for hiring and promotion, but in recognition through the merit of hard work and talent, although she also believes that for this to represent “equal opportunity”, people who are disadvantaged in some way should be offered help right from the beginning of their studies, both financially and educationally. She describes INRIA as a competitive workplace because there are so many talented, hard-working scientists, and as a place where she feels at home both as a director of research and as a working scientist.

She does, however, note the challenges working mothers face. She is also aware that INRIA’s efforts to reach out to school children and high school teenagers to engage them in math and science are attracting fewer girls than previously, an understandably perplexing state of affairs to a woman who became so enthralled by science as a young girl.

Another friend of many years, Catherine Carletto, a chemical engineer and marketing executive with the Unipex Group, believes Zerubia is a role model: “I am happy that this strong (in her mind) girl could be put under the light because she could be a good example for our time of a woman with good potential, working, learning and climbing to arrive at the same level as men, but without looking like a man. She has a high intellectual level, a curiosity, a rigor and a strong work ethic.”

But, Zerubia brushes aside the idea that her gender played any role in her elevation to the rank of IEEE Fellow (she was one of 43 women and 219 men who were elevated to that rank in 2003). She was “very happy” at the honor, but she entered the competition for Fellow because she was “curious” about how it worked. “I love both reflection and action” she says. “I love to be a part of the game.” She is also an Associate Editor for European Space Organizations and Industries, Space Signal and Image Processing for Earthzine, and enjoys helping to organize international conferences, publishing and other Institute activities.

Zerubia’s specialty is Markovian modeling in image processing and remote sensing. For non-mathematicians, the Encyclopedia Britannica provides this abbreviated definition: “A stochastic process is called Markovian (after the Russian mathematician Andrey Andreyevich Markov) if at any time t the conditional probability of an arbitrary future event given the entire past of the process – i.e., given X(s) for all s ≤ t – equals the conditional probability of that future event given only X(t). Thus, in order to make a probabilistic statement about the future behavior of a Markov process, it is no more helpful to know the entire history of the process than it is to know only its current state…”

Another more descriptive definition is given by Professor Oliver Ibe, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA.

Burnt area detection after a forest fire in 2005 in Corsica, France (about 1000 hectares) SPOT 5 Image © CNES 2005, Distribution SPOT Image. Extracted boundaries © INRIA Sophia Antipolis - ARIANA

“Markov processes are used to model systems with limited memory. They are used in many areas including communications systems, transportation networks, image segmentation and analysis, biological systems and DNA sequence analysis, random atomic motion and diffusion in physics, social mobility, population studies, epidemiology, animal and insect migration, queuing systems, resource management, dams, financial engineering, actuarial science, and decision systems…”

She explained that her contribution to this field, in collaboration with her students and research partners, has been to develop Markovian models for image processing in general, and to apply them to remote sensing images in particular. The idea of limited memory in time is replaced with the idea of a “local neighborhood” in an image. The properties of an image are initially described only in each local neighborhood, but taken all together they describe the whole image: “The local neighborhood is sufficient to predict globally what will happen in the entire image.”

Ariana, the research group Zerubia still leads, uses such mathematical models to tackle inverse problems related to Earth observation and cartography. Applications of this research are legion, including using high resolution satellite images to detect and count populations of nesting flamingos worldwide, as well as penguins in Antarctica, and to detect at their onset (and assess after the fact the damage caused by) the wildfires that roar across the Riviera and Corsica every August.

In 2007, that research was made vividly immediate to her when helicopters whirled overhead dropping fire retardant on a small fire that began in a supermarket parking lot and engulfed the pines not two miles from the building where she and her group anxiously worked. The mixture of summer tourists, many of them campers, dense pine woods, high temperatures, and arid winds creates hazardous fires and urgent public safety demand for their research.

She said they obtain satellite images from several sources (the French Space Agency, CNES; the French National Geographic Institute, IGN; the French National Forest Inventory, IFN; the German Space Agency (DLR); Thales Alenia Space; EADS Astrium;…), and work with fire brigade members to draw maps that enable them to forecast the probable risk and direction of new fires, and to analyze burned areas for insurance purposes and the like.

Examples of past ARIANA projects: Agricultural and peri-urban areas classification result, using Markov random fields from a hyperspectral image. Left: © Astrium/EADS. Right: © INRIA/ARIANA

Gazing On the Future of Earth Observation

The developments in remote sensing over the last twenty years have made the challenges of observing and mapping the Earth more exciting for her.

“Twenty years ago,” she said, “with satellite images from Landsat in the USA or SPOT 1or 2 in Europe, we could analyze images of cities, but it was difficult to see any detail. Now, we can count the buildings and see the details of trees, rivers and roads – even the cars on the roads. So, we have to change the mathematical models.”

“Before, when we had lower resolution, we could use Markov random fields. Now, with very high resolution images, we have to introduce geometry in a stochastic way into these models. This is why we have introduced marked point processes.”

The research of the Ariana group will continue to build on this work – improving the quality of the images obtained from remote sensing, and introducing geometry into the models (using not only stochastic processes, but also variational methods) in order to extract more detailed information from the images.

She is optimistic that environmental efforts will be in time and sufficient to rescue planet Earth. “I think awareness of what we have done to the environment is growing and that what we do has serious consequences to Nature. I hope the new generation will be more careful. I am not a pessimistic person. I am hopeful.”

Eastern White Pine – Pinus strobus L. USDA photo

In the early years of the nation, millions of acres of Eastern white pine – Pinus strobus L. – stretched across southern Canada, the northeastern U.S., and as far west as northeastern Iowa, and as far south as northern Georgia. But by the 1800s most of the New World’s vast virgin forests had been logged out. Yet the Eastern white pine is a fast-growing conifer, upright with long five-needled polystelic shoots and it still abounds, second only to the sugar maple in numbers.

The neighboring state of Maine holds the title of “The Pine Tree State” and boasts the tallest Eastern white pine now standing at 132 feet (National Register of Big Trees), but New Hampshire’s harvest of Eastern white pine and hardwoods is still the state’s largest industry at $134 million for the wood alone. Emblematic of the dominance of trees in New Hampshire’s culture and economy are the University of New Hampshire’s academic and cooperative extension forestry programs for landowners, conservationists, students, researchers, policy planners and the lumber industry.

Yet industrial and automobile pollution concentrated around the state’s cities had taken their toll on the Eastern white pine. Residents didn’t need a forestry degree to see that the trees looked unhealthy—stunted with rust-colored needles. Congress passed the Clean Air Act Amendment of 1990 to reduce the volume and size of air particulates and their damage to human health (death included) and vegetation. Subsequent amendments went even further. But when the smog cleared, there still was no systematic, scientific evidence to measure how much the Clean Air Act was helping the trees.

Forest Watch Established

Dr. Barrett N. “Barry” Rock, professor of forestry, botany and remote sensing in the Complex Systems Research Center and the Department of Natural Resources at the University of New Hampshire, wanted to see if the Clean Air Act was working.

Rock, who had earned his Ph.D. in botany at the University of Maryland, conducts research and publishes on the remote sensing of vegetation, specifically on basic and applied research dealing with biophysical properties (pigment concentrations, anatomical characteristics, and moisture conditions) of leaves and their influence on reflectance features which may be remotely detected. He has been involved in vegetation discrimination and mapping of deciduous forest species in the eastern United States, spectral characterization and mapping of arid and semi-arid vegetation in the western United States, as well as assessment of state-of-health in coniferous vegetation using remotely sensed data, with emphasis on the use of high-spectral resolution data sets for this purpose.

He teaches, and runs a remote sensing research program with masters and doctoral students, but it was nowhere near large enough to undertake such an enormous project (was the Clean Air Act working?). He has also been deeply involved in K-12 education outreach in the U.S. and the Czech Republic, so he understands how to engage young students in scientific inquiry and its application. His solution to resolve his personnel shortage was organic.

He founded the Forest Watch Program in 1991 to draw upon thousands of primary and secondary school children and their teachers that he would train to become front-line researchers. Forest Watch is now in 160 schools throughout New England.

Forest Watch Authentic Science

Interviewed at the IGARSS conference in Boston last summer, he said Forest Watch students participate in three types of authentic science: forest stand assessment, laboratory-based assessment of damage symptoms, and image processing/data analysis of Landsat Thematic Mapper data for the area around their school.

The Forest Watch website reports that “participating schools select a permanent sampling plot in a pine stand and conduct several ecological and biophysical measurements using specific scientific protocols developed at UNH… Student data are compared to spectral data collected from samples sent to UNH, and the student and spectral data are compared to troposphere ozone data collected from state and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality monitoring sites throughout New England.”

“If I had hundreds of graduate students out there measuring trees, that would be great,” he said. “But that’s not realistic, so I have middle-schoolers, third-graders, and 11th-graders making measurements. As long as I can determine if those measurements are reliable, then I have data. And I have data sets that I have access to that I wouldn’t have in any other way.”

“We now have a long-term database and we can compare the data provided by the students of their foliage, using standard protocols,” Rock said. “Their data have been shown to be reliable. They are doing something that’s scientifically important and they’re contributing to an ongoing research project of benefit to their community,” Rock said. “So they’re getting excited about science and doing important stuff. To me that’s a win-win.”

A Forest Watch student and Barry Rock chart the health of white pines

“I’m looking at it as they are giving me information that I can use. We publish a State of the Forest document annually. Two thirds of the publication’s data comes from students.”

“We’ve learned essentially three things: the first and most important is that after the Clean Air Act amendments in the 1990s, the trees became dramatically healthier. It’s very significant that these amendments went into effect in 1994 and 1996, because we were seeing positive responses in the student data collected in 1996, 1997, 1998. The trees went from being reasonably unhealthy to being healthy, and they remain healthy across the 2000s.”

“The second thing we’re learning is that by measuring trees as they grow, the measurements of the rate of increase in growth give us the amount of carbon uptake (sequestration). White pine is a very common species in New England found extensively throughout all of the New England states. It is the second most prevalent species of tree, second only to sugar maple. The change in the rate of growth increase is that as the trees got healthier they start sequestering more and more carbon. We can use student data as input into climate models that can then tell us overall the storage capacity for carbon when the white pine is healthy.”

“The third thing we’re learning about Forest Watch is–as an indicator of climate change–it is educating the students who then go home and educate their parents. It has a multiplier effect. We use it as a vehicle for educating the public about climate change and it’s really very effective.”

“Having been in existence since 1991, I now have students that were pre-college Forest Watch students who are now at the University of New Hampshire. They are all concerned and excited about climate change. I now have people with PhDs who are teaching at colleges around the country and who started off in Forest Watch.”

A Future New England Climate?

In 2001, Rock was the lead author and general editor of the New England Regional Assessment, conducted between 1997 and 2001, that surveyed climate change impacts to the region, both over the past 100 years, and those projected for the future. The report–Preparing for a Changing Climate: New England Regional Overview of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change–was a major outreach component of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s National Assessment project.

The report’s two climate change models predict an altered New England over the next 100 years. “The Hadley Model projects a warming of 6º F in annual minimum temperatures and a 30% increase in precipitation for the region, while the Canadian Model projects a 10º F warming in minimum temperatures and a 10% precipitation increase over the next century. Either temperature increase would be greater than any climatic variation experienced in the region in the past 10,000 years. If either scenario occurs, the climate of the New England Region will be profoundly different than the climate of today.”

Eastern white pine long five-needled polystelic shoots. USDA photo.

Said Rock, “The future of New England depends on what we do about climate change. The warming that is projected with increasing levels of CO² will change New England very fundamentally. The indicator I use to show the very fundamental way that New England will change is to look at the 30 year temperature change for Boston from 1961 through 1990. Add 6° to it, which is the low end of the projection for warming over the next 100 years and that’s assuming we take steps to reduce CO² levels, and you get the average temperature for Richmond, Virginia. If you add 10° to it, that’s the average temperature for Atlanta, Georgia. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Richmond, Virginia or Atlanta, Georgia, but I like Boston the way it is.”

“I can’t imagine New England if things become more humid, it’s hotter and the growing seasons change, species of trees change. It will be a very different place. Of course, now with the demands of the scientific community to decrease carbon 80 percent by 2050– which is a tall order but achievable–we’re going to see it get warmer, anyway. But I hope it’s only 3° not 60. Stabilizing our climate by 2020 would be desirable, but that’s not going to happen. There is no hope of keeping things the way they are today.”

“We just have to divorce ourselves from fossil fuels. I drive a Prius, my wife drives a Prius: they average 50 miles per gallon of gasoline. We used to drive a Ford Explorer that got 15 miles per gallon. In the five years that we’ve had the two cars we have emitted 85 tons less carbon. So these are achievable targets but we have to take them seriously.”

“This is where education comes in, this is where outreach comes in, and that’s what this conference (IGARSS) is all about.”

Stephen at Mt. Kilimanjaro

After being accepted for admission to the Peace Corps in 2005, I took my leave-of-absence from IBM and boarded a plane for Africa. The pre-service orientation in Philadelphia was exciting. The 12 shots were, well, OK. The first leg of the trip from Philadelphia to Paris felt normal. The second leg of the trip on Air France from Paris to Bamako, Mali was long. The Sahara Desert is big. (It is the largest desert in the world, covering 9,100,000 square kilometers (km²)).ⁱ As we descended into the capital city of Bamako, the street lights had an eerie quality. It turned out that many of them were not street lights at all, but rather fires. The plane stopped at the terminal, the doors opened, and my world changed. I was introduced to 110 degree heat and a whole new way of living.

For the next two years, from September 2005 to September 2007, I experienced a life style much more similar to how 80 percent of the world’s population lives compared to what I was familiar with in the USA. Eating, hygiene, sleeping, and security all had to be relearned. Everything was very different than what I was used to. I later learned that the environment was also different compared to what my African friends had known only a short time ago. They think that many of these changes could be caused by climate change.

In this essay, I share several of my personal experiences related to climate in Mali and Kenya. In addition to my own story, I share the stories from two friends that I made in Africa; Tamba Traore in Mali, and Raphael Otiri in Kenya. Taken together, this will give you a sense of the climatic changes experienced in Mali and Kenya.

Before we start the story, however, here is some background information. The continent of Africa is 30,065,000 sq km (11,608,000 sq miles). That makes it the planet’s second largest continent, with 20.2% of earth’s land in (53) individual countries. The population: is 877,500,000 (2006) It contains the Nile River, the world’s longest, and the massive Sahara Desert, the world’s largest desert.ⁱⁱ In contrast, the land area of the USA is 9,161,923 sq km (3,537,436 sq miles) with a population of 303,824,646.ⁱⁱⁱ

The country of Mali has 1.22 million sq km and a population of 12.3 million people. Mali is among the poorest countries in the world, with 65 percent of its land area desert or semi desert. Economic activity is largely confined to the riverine area irrigated by the Niger River. About 10 percent of the population is nomadic and some 80 percent of the labor force is engaged in farming and fishing.^iv The Sahara Desert occupies the northern part of the continent, and surveys have shown that it is currently advancing at the rate of 5 to 6 km per year.^v

My Village in Mali

After finishing three initial months of Peace Corps orientation, I was assigned to live and work in the village of Markala. It is a village of about 17,000 people, located about 40 kilometers north of Segou. Markala is just south of the Sahara Desert. I was the only white person there.

Most of the houses are made of mud, but newer structures are sometimes made of concrete blocks that are made onsite. There were a few strategically placed community wells that aid agencies had built. They had relatively recently been dug very deep to provide water. Some families had wells on their property. Periodically those families needed to have their wells dug deeper because they dried up. My assigned work location was a bank that distributes microfinance loans. “Microfinance offers poor people access to basic financial services such as loans, savings, money transfer services and microinsurance.”

During the first few weeks living in Markala, I noticed donkeys hauling carts of firewood everyday. I asked villagers about this. I was told that the men and donkeys travel one or two days away from the village to cut the wood, and one or two days back to the village to sell it. The donkeys travel all through the night, while the man sleeps on a sling mounted under the cart. Every so often, when the donkey, man and cart are on a main road at night, they will get hit by a big truck and killed. It used to be that wood was nearby the village. No longer is that true.

Rains could be heavy in July and August. During that rainy season, once every day or two the skies would get very black, winds would pick up, and torrential downpours would last from a few minutes to an hour or two. If I was caught outside during the heavy winds, I needed to put goggles over my eyes and a handkerchief over my nose and mouth to make it back home. After every rainy season the mud houses needed to be repaired due to the rain damage to the walls. The poorest of families could not afford the repairs. If repairs were not made several years in a row, their houses would collapse. Streets in the village were almost all dirt, and after the rains small catchments would create mini ponds. I could hear a cacophony of toads or frogs all night long. They were very loud!

In order to perform my work well, I needed to continually advance my capacity in the French language. Therefore, I went to the local high school and sought out a tutor. Someone who taught English and was a native French speaker would be the ideal tutor for me. That is how I met Tamba Traore. He turned out not only to be my French tutor, but also became my good friend.

We often had my French lessons at Tamba’s house. One of his two wives would bring a small table into the concession, the dirt open area where most family activities took place. (Moslem men can have up to four wives.) We got chairs, even though many people sat on the ground. During my lessons, Tamba shared his memories of local history. Here is a summary of Tamba’s historical perspective on climate changes.

Tamba

In 1960, Mali was known as the breadbasket of West Africa. Weather patterns were regular and predictable, like the stars. The storks’ presence announced the coming of the cool season, which lasted 5 or 6 months. Children welcomed the storks with songs. Rains came in the summer. Farmers could sow seeds on the 19th of August and expect a good harvest. One could harvest peanuts 12 times in the same season. Animals had water all year. Vegetation was very dense.

In 1973 a large dry spell came.^vii It decimated livestock. Rural people began to cut wood to earn a living. This caused increased deforestation. Plants and animals were seriously affected. Crops were greatly reduced. Hunters became just carriers of guns. Streams dried out. Fishermen became unemployed. Houses were built in the old stream beds. Then the least precipitation inundated the inhabitants of these houses. The water would become polluted for drinking. Famine caused thousands of young people to flee their family villages. The government did not have money to try to alleviate all of these impacts. The environment degraded dangerously.

Markala is a striking example. The village had a reputation for the production of fish. Today, most fish sold in the village are imported from Senegal. The fishing season was 3 months; now it is not more than 2 or 3 weeks. The Niger River cannot respond to the demand. The cost of a donkey cart full of firewood, roughly 3m³, was $4 in 1985 and now it is $12. The cool season is not as long as it once was. In 2007, a very hot season killed all of the mosquitoes in the neighboring village called Niono (pronounced Nee-oh no). It had been known as a kingdom for mosquitoes. All of the radios talked about this event.

Another neighboring village is named “Thien” (pronounced ‘tee-yen’). There, the milk cow used to be very important in the village. The population needed it for survival. Citizens could earn a living 12 months of the year without having to leave the village. Thien was self supporting and exported its surplus of food to neighboring villages and cities. It was not necessary to fertilize the soil because it was very fertile and produced many cabbages, eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, salads, onions, and potatoes. In nearby markets, the products brought by truck from Thien were without equal for their quality and taste. With money from the sale of food, villagers paid for livestock (cattle and sheep) and poultry. There was also money for clothes, and dowries for marriages. All their needs were met. Then came high temperatures. Rains became rare, surface water disappeared so the farmers had to use underground water. Cattle became thin. Food in the fields dried up. Many people left the village. Some people in the village starved. Adjacent markets lost quality food.

Tamba says that the environment has become unrecognizable. He attributes these changes to climate change, which he thinks is a real menace for all of humanity.

Travel to Kenya

Many Peace Corps volunteers return home to the US one or more times during their two terms of service. I decided to immerse myself in Africa. I did not return home. Rather, I wanted to learn about animals in Africa. I discovered that there are no significant numbers of wild animals in West Africa, where Mali is. Those animals were largely killed off during the 1960s and ’70s. Wild animals in large enough quantities to attract tourists occur in eastern and southern Africa. Yet I did not want to go as a tourist. I had been in Africa for 1.5 years already. So I searched for an alternative way of learning about wild African animals, and found a research safari. I boarded a plane and headed to Kenya, in eastern Africa.

Mt. Kilimanjaro

During my work with David Muchuri, the wildlife researcher, I learned that adult elephants need 300-600 pounds of food and about 50 gallons of water a day. Even within his young lifetime, David has noticed reduced snow at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro^viii, the highest point in Africa. The snow melt provides the tremendous amount of water that the elephants need. By the year 2030, he said, the snow is expected to be completely melted. If there is no snow, there will be no water for the elephants. David did not know of a likely positive outcome, although he and his fellow researchers continue to search alternatives for the elephants.

On the way back to Nairobi from the safari, I noticed a vast expanse of ramshackle huts. I asked the researcher what that was. He said “Kibera, the second largest slum in Africa”. I said that I wanted to go there. He had never before had a client asking him to go into the slum, but he agreed to help me. With his help, and the knowledge that I had gained during my Peace Corps training, I proceeded to make my way into the slum. Following protocols, I met the chief. He asked me why I wanted to enter Kibera. I responded that I wanted to learn about the needs of small business people. He agreed to let me enter, and he assigned an elder named Zachary to accompany me. It would not have been safe for me to enter on my own.

Zachary introduced me to a small businessman named Raphael Owino Otiri. Raphael had started a self-help group to benefit widows and orphans by making and selling jewelry made out of cow bones discarded from restaurants in Nairobi. I began helping Raphael to find outlets for his jewelry in the USA. Now I work with churches and civic organizations to sell Kibera Bone Jewelry. Proceeds of all sales directly benefit widows and orphans in Kibera. To this day, Raphael and I are friends.

I asked Raphael to tell me what he notices about climate changes. Here is what he told me.

The author with Raphael and family

For the last 15 years, climate has changed drastically. We have not yet received enough rainfall. The most affected areas are the Eastern Coast, North Eastern, Nyanza and part of Central and Rift Valley provinces.

This climate change has affected millions of people in our country because there is no food in the provinces. Many people have turned to wild fruits and even eating wild tree leaves. Since most people in these arid and semi arid areas depend mostly on livestock as their main source of livelihood, they are migrating to other areas looking for pasture for the livestock. In the process of migration, conflicts arise with neighboring communities. The primary conflict is for the valuable commodity, water.

While this is happening, people continue to prepare their farms. The rains will come, but not right on time. This leads people to uproot crops from the farms just to live. In the rural area where I come from there is no water for people or animals to drink. Millions of people from rural areas depend on rain water which flows in small rivers in those areas. They fetch water daily from these rivers for their use and for the domestic animals. Domestic animals, wild animals and wild birds die because of drought. Small rivers running across cities and towns are heavily polluted with wastes from the factories, residential and slum areas.

The climate change in my country has caused children not to go to school because of hunger and some schools end up being closed due to lack of attendance. When it does rain, we have heavy floods which cause a lot of destruction to people and property. People evacuate to high grounds. As this happens the farms that were prepared are swept away, Animals and sometimes people are killed. This makes the food shortage worse and spreads diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, typhoid and other water born diseases.

This is what I can tell you now, but there is more damage caused by climate change in my country, Kenya.

Summary

My Peace Corps experience in Africa profoundly changed my life. It gave me a deep appreciation of ancient cultures, of kindness transcending poverty, and of poverty previously unimaginable to me. I also got a sense of the significant possible consequences of future changes in climate that might affect my friends. These feelings and knowledge want to make me work all the harder to moderate these impacts. You may contact me at peacecorpsafricasteve@yahoo.com.

Work Cited

ⁱ http://www.eoearth.org/article/Sahara_desert

ⁱⁱ http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/af.htm

ⁱⁱⁱ http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/namerica/usstates/uslandst.htm

^iv https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ml.html#Econ

^v http://www.ciesin.org/docs/002-178/002-178.html#fn10 DECARP, 1976b. SDEC and Rehabilitation Programme. Summary presentation Prepared jointly by The General Adm. for Natural Resources, Min. of Agr. Food and Natural Resources and The Agr. Res. Council, National Council for Res. in coll. with UNEP, UNDP and FAO, 21 pp.

^vi http://www.cgap.org/p/site/c/template.rc/1.26.1302

^vii http://www.geog.ucla.edu/~yxue/pdf/2002desXue.pdf “Under What Conditions Does Land-cover Change Impact Regional Climate?”, Y. XUE1 and M.J. FENNESSY2, 1. Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA90095–1524, U.S.A., 2 Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, Calverton, MD 20705–3106, U.S.A.

^viii http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=3054, Images courtesy Jim Williams, NASA GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio, and the Landsat 7 Science Team