Geospatial Data Market Study

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Study by Frontier Economics: “Frontier Economics was commissioned by the Geospatial Commission to carry out a detailed economic study of the size, features and characteristics of the UK geospatial data market. The Geospatial Commission was established within the Cabinet Office in 2018, as an independent, expert committee responsible for setting the UK’s Geospatial Strategy and coordinating public sector geospatial activity. The Geospatial Commission’s aim is to unlock the significant economic, social and environmental opportunities offered by location data. The UK’s Geospatial Strategy (2020) sets out how the UK can unlock the full power of location data and take advantage of the significant economic, social and environmental opportunities offered by location data….

Like many other forms of data, the value of geospatial data is not limited to the data creator or data user. Value from using geospatial data can be subdivided into several different categories, based on who the value accrues to:

Direct use value: where value accrues to users of geospatial data. This could include government using geospatial data to better manage public assets like roadways.

Indirect use value: where value is also derived by indirect beneficiaries who interact with direct users. This could include users of the public assets who benefit from better public service provision.

Spillover use value: value that accrues to others who are not a direct data user or indirect beneficiary. This could, for example, include lower levels of emissions due to improvement management of the road network by government. The benefits of lower emissions are felt by all of society even those who do not use the road network.

As the value from geospatial data does not always accrue to the direct user of the data, there is a risk of underinvestment in geospatial technology and services. Our £6 billion estimate of turnover for a subset of geospatial firms in 2018 does not take account of these wider economic benefits that “spill over” across the UK economy, and generate additional value. As such, the value that geospatial data delivers is likely to be significantly higher than we have estimated and is therefore an area for potential future investment….(More)”.

Google launches new tool to help cities stay cool

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Justine Calma: “Google unveiled a tool today that could help cities keep their residents cool by mapping out where trees are needed most. Cities tend to be warmer than surrounding areas because buildings and asphalt trap heat. An easy way to cool metropolitan areas down is to plant more trees in neighborhoods where they’re sparse.

Google’s new Tree Canopy Lab uses aerial imagery and Google’s AI to figure out where every tree is in a city. Tree Canopy Lab puts that information on an interactive map along with additional data on which neighborhoods are more densely populated and are more vulnerable to high temperatures. The hope is that planting new trees in these areas could help cities adapt to a warming world and save lives during heat waves.

Google piloted Tree Canopy Lab in Los Angeles. Data on hundreds more cities is on the way, the company says. City planners interested in using the tool in the future can reach out to Google through a form it posted along with today’s announcement.

“We’ll be able to really home in on where the best strategic investment will be in terms of addressing that urban heat,” says Rachel Malarich, Los Angeles’ first city forest officer.

Google claims that its new tool can save cities like Los Angeles time when it comes to taking inventory of their trees. That’s often done by sending people to survey each block. Los Angeles has also used LIDAR technology to map their urban forest in the past, which uses a laser sensor to detect the trees — but that process was expensive and slow, according to Malarich. Google’s new service, on the other hand, is free to use and will be updated regularly using images the company already takes by plane for Google Maps….(More)”.

Macron’s green democracy experiment gets political

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Louise Guillot and Elisa Braun at Politico: “Emmanuel Macron asked 150 ordinary people to help figure out France’s green policies — and now this citizens’ convention is turning into a political problem for the French president.

The Citizens’ Convention on Climate was aimed at calming tensions in the wake of the Yellow Jackets protest movement — which was sparked by a climate tax on fuel — and showing that Macron wasn’t an out-of-touch elitist.

After nine months of deliberations, the convention came up with 149 proposals to slash greenhouse gas emissions this summer. The government has to put some of these measures before the parliament for them to become binding, and a bill is due to be presented in December.

But that’s too slow for many of the convention’s members, who feel the government is back-pedalling on some of the ideas and that Macron has poked fun at them.

Muriel Raulic, a member of the convention, accused Macron of using the body to greenwash his administration.

She supports a moratorium on 5G high-speed mobile technology, which has created some health and environmental fears. Macron has dismissed proponents of the ban as “Amish” — a Christian sect suspicious of technology.

The 150 members wrote an open letter to Macron in mid-October, complaining about a lack of “clear and defined support from the executive, whose positions sometimes appear contradictory,” and to “openly hostile communications” from “certain professional actors.”

Some gathered late last month before the National Assembly to complain they felt used and treated like “guinea pigs” by politicians. In June, they created an association to oversee what the government is doing with their proposals. 

…The government denied it is using the convention to greenwash itself….(More)”.

Poor data on groundwater jeopardizes climate resilience

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rebecca Root at Devex: “A lack of data on groundwater is impeding water management and could jeopardize climate resilience efforts in some places, according to recent research by WaterAid and the HSBC Water Programme.

Groundwater is found underground in gaps between soil, sand, and rock. Over 2.5 million people are thought to depend on groundwater — which has a higher tolerance to droughts than other water sources — for drinking.

The report looked at groundwater security and sustainability in Bangladesh, Ghana, India, Nepal, and Nigeria, where collectively more than 160 million people lack access to clean water close to home. It found that groundwater data tends to be limited — including on issues such as overextraction, pollution, and contamination — leaving little evidence for decision-makers to consider for its management.

“There’s a general lack of information and data … which makes it very hard to manage the resource sustainably,” said Vincent Casey, senior water, sanitation, and hygiene manager for waste at WaterAid…(More)”.

The Practice and Potential of Blockchain Technologies for Extractive Sector Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Important questions are being raised about whether blockchain technologies can contribute to solving governance challenges in the mining, oil and gas sectors. This report seeks to begin addressing such questions, with particular reference to current blockchain applications and transparency efforts in the extractive sector.

It summarizes analysis by The Governance Lab (GovLab) at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI). The study focused in particular on three activity areas: licensing and contracting, corporate registers and beneficial ownership, and commodity trading and supply chains.

Key messages:

  • Blockchain technology could potentially reduce transparency challenges and information asymmetries in certain parts of the extractives value chain. However, stakeholders considering blockchain technologies need a more nuanced understanding of problem definition, value proposition and blockchain attributes to ensure that such interventions could positively impact extractive sector governance.
  • The blockchain field currently lacks design principles, governance best practices, and open data standards that could ensure that the technology helps advance transparency and good governance in the extractive sector. Our analysis offers an initial set of design principles that could act as a starting point for a more targeted approach to the use of blockchain in improving extractives governance.
  • Most blockchain projects are preliminary concepts or pilots, with little demonstration of how to effectively scale up successful experiments, especially in countries with limited resources.
  • Meaningful impact evaluations or peer-reviewed publications that assess impact, including on the implications of blockchain’s emissions footprint, are still lacking. More broadly, a shared research agenda around blockchain could help address questions that are particularly ripe for future research.
  • Transition to a blockchain-enabled system is likely to be smoother and faster in cases when digital records are already available than when a government or company attempts to move from an analog system to one leveraging blockchain.
  • Companies or governments using blockchain are more likely to implement it successfully when they have a firm grasp of the technology, its strengths, its weaknesses, and how it fits into the broader governance landscape. But often these actors are often overly reliant on and empowering of blockchain technology vendors and startups, which can lead to “lock-in”, whereby the market gets stuck with an approach even though market participants may be better off with an alternative.
  • The role played by intermediaries like financial institutions or registrars can determine the success or failure of blockchain applications….(More)”.

The open source movement takes on climate data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Heather Clancy: “…many companies are moving to disclose “climate risk,” although far fewer are moving to actually minimize it. And as those tasked with preparing those reports can attest, the process of gathering the data for them is frustrating and complex, especially as the level of detail desired and required by investors becomes deeper.

That pain point was the inspiration for a new climate data project launched this week that will be spearheaded by the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit host organization for thousands of the most influential open source software and data initiatives in the world such as GitHub. The foundation is central to the evolution of the Linux software that runs in the back offices of most major financial services firms. 

There are four powerful founding members for the new group, the LF Climate Finance Foundation (LFCF): Insurance and asset management company Allianz, cloud software giants Amazon and Microsoft, and data intelligence powerhouse S&P Global. The foundation’s “planning team” includes World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Ceres and the Sustainability Account Standards Board (SASB).

The group’s intention is to collaborate on an open source project called the OS-Climate platform, which will include economic and physical risk scenarios that investors, regulators, companies, financial analysts and others can use for their analysis. 

The idea is to create a “public service utility” where certain types of climate data can be accessed easily, then combined with other, more proprietary information that someone might be using for risk analysis, according to Truman Semans, CEO of OS-Climate, who was instrumental in getting the effort off the ground. “There are a whole lot of initiatives out there that address pieces of the puzzle, but no unified platform to allow those to interoperate,” he told me. There are a whole lot of initiatives out there that address pieces of the puzzle, but no unified platform to allow those to interoperate.

Why does this matter? It helps to understand the history of open source software, which was once a thing that many powerful software companies, notably Microsoft, abhorred because they were worried about the financial hit on their intellectual property. Flash forward to today and the open source software movement, “staffed” by literally millions of software developers, is credited with accelerating the creation of common system-level elements so that companies can focus their own resources on solving problems directly related to their business.

In short, this budding effort could make the right data available more quickly, so that businesses — particularly financial institutions — can make better informed decisions.

Or, as Microsoft’s chief intellectual property counsel, Jennifer Yokoyama, observed in the announcement press release: “Addressing climate issues in a meaningful way requires people and organizations to have access to data to better understand the impact of their actions. Opening up and sharing our contribution of significant and relevant sustainability data through the LF Climate Finance Foundation will help advance the financial modeling and understanding of climate change impact — an important step in affecting political change. We’re excited to collaborate with the other founding members and hope additional organizations will join.”…(More)”

Behavioral Contagion Could Spread the Benefits of a Carbon Tax

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert H. Frank at the New York Times: “…Why, then, hasn’t the United States adopted a carbon tax? One hurdle is the fear that emissions would fall too slowly in response to a carbon tax, that more direct measures are needed. Another difficulty is that political leaders have reason to fear voter opposition to taxation of any kind. But there are persuasive rejoinders to both objections.

Regarding the first, critics are correct that a carbon tax alone won’t parry the climate threat. It is also true that as creatures of habit, humans tend to change their behavior only slowly, even in the face of significant financial incentives. But even small changes in behavior are greatly amplified by behavioral contagion — the social scientist’s term for how ideas and behaviors spread from person to person like infectious diseases. And if a carbon tax were to shift the behavior of some individuals now, those changes would quickly spread more widely.

Smoking rates, for example, changed little in the short run even as cigarette taxes rose sharply, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The most powerful predictor of whether someone will smoke is the percentage of her friends who smoke. Most smokers stick with their habit in the face of higher taxes, but a small minority quit, and still others refrain from starting.

Every peer group that includes those people thus contains a smaller proportion of smokers, which influences still others to quit or refrain, and so on. This contagion process explains why the percentage of American adults who smoke has fallen by two-thirds since the mid-1960s.

Behavioral contagion would similarly amplify the effects of a carbon tax. By making solar power cheaper in comparison with fossil fuels, for example, the tax would initially encourage a small number of families to install solar panels on their rooftops. But as with cigarette taxes, it’s the indirect effects that really matter….(More)”.

Sandboxing Nature: How Regulatory Sandboxes Could Help Restore Species, Enhance Water Quality and Build Better Habitats Faster

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

White Paper by Phoebe Higgins & Timothy Male: “Late in 2017, the United Kingdom’s energy regulator, Ofgem, gave fast approval for a new project allowing residents to buy and sell renewable energy from solar panels and batteries within their own apartment buildings. Normally, this would not be legal since UK energy rules dictate that locally generated energy can only be used by the owner or sold back to the grid at a relatively low price. However, the earlier establishment of a regulatory sandbox for such energy delivery modernizations created a path to try something new and get it approved quickly. In April 2018, only a few months after project initiation, the first peer-to-peer energy trades within apartment complexes started.

Energy policy is not the only space where rules need fast modification to make allowances for all the novelty arising in the world today. The protection and restoration of our water, healthy soil and wildlife resources are static processes, starved for creativity. A United Nations’ panel recently reported on the extinction risks that face more than one million species around the globe. In a 2009 National Rivers and Streams Assessment, the EPA reported that 46 percent of U.S. waterways were in ‘poor’ biological condition, and more than 40 percent were polluted with high levels of nitrogen or phosphorus.

Innovators have big ideas that could help with these problems, but ponderous regulatory systems and older generations of bureaucrats aren’t used to the fast pace of new technologies, tools and products. Often, it is a simple thing—one word or phrase in a policy or regulation—that is a barrier to a new technology or technique being widely used. However, one sentence can be just as hard and slow to change as a whole law. Rather than simply accept this regulatory status quo, we believe in the need to find, nurture and learn from new concepts even when it means deliberately
breaking old rules.

Regulatory sandboxes like the one in the United Kingdom open the door to testing new approaches within a controlled environment. While they don’t ensure success, they make it possible for new technologies and tools to be explored in real-world settings. Not just so that innovators can learn, but also to allow government bureaucracies to catch up to the present and adapt to the future. Our planet and country need more opportunities to do this….(More)“

Data-Driven Unsustainability? An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Governing the Environmental Impacts of a Data-Driven Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Federica Lucivero et al : “Data-driven digital technologies are often presented in policy agendas as contributing to the goal of sustainable development by providing information to reduce energy consumption and offering a green alternative to industries and behaviour with a higher environmental footprint. However, it is widely acknowledged in the context of environmental research that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in general, and data centres and cloud computing in particular, have a heavy footprint featuring a high consumption of non-renewable energy, waste production and carbon dioxide emissions. In spite of this, environmental issues have so far figured only sparsely in both policy initiatives supporting data-driven digital initiatives, as well as in recent ethics and governance scholarly literature discussing the data-driven revolution. We convened an interdisciplinary workshop to map out the current conceptual landscape on the environmental impacts of data-driven technologies, and to explore how ethical thinking can contribute to it. In this commentary, we discuss the main themes that emerged and our call for action….(More)”.

Harnessing the collective intelligence of stakeholders for conservation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Steven Gray et al: ” Incorporating relevant stakeholder input into conservation decision making is fundamentally challenging yet critical for understanding both the status of, and human pressures on, natural resources. Collective intelligence (CI ), defined as the ability of a group to accomplish difficult tasks more effectively than individuals, is a growing area of investigation, with implications for improving ecological decision making. However, many questions remain about the ways in which emerging internet technologies can be used to apply CI to natural resource management. We examined how synchronous social‐swarming technologies and asynchronous “wisdom of crowds” techniques can be used as potential conservation tools for estimating the status of natural resources exploited by humans.

Using an example from a recreational fishery, we show that the CI of a group of anglers can be harnessed through cyber‐enabled technologies. We demonstrate how such approaches – as compared against empirical data – could provide surprisingly accurate estimates that align with formal scientific estimates. Finally, we offer a practical approach for using resource stakeholders to assist in managing ecosystems, especially in data‐poor situations….(More)”.