Category: Sustainability

The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) announced the 21 projects from 17 developing countries that will be awarded $1.5 million USD worth of cloud services, grants, and technical support through the Earth Observation Cloud Credits Programme. Under the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), this programme will enable Earth observations and applications to support sustainable environmental development including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Radiant Earth Foundation is a nonprofit focused on delivering open geospatial data and analytics to the global development community (GDC) in support of their missions to address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other key targets. Radiant Earth supports GDC by aggregating open geospatial data and providing access through its cloud-based platform, generating open Earth Observation (EO) machine learning tools and training data libraries, and creating new metadata standards through its MLHub Earth initiative. Additionally, the organization offers training resources to support capacity development and expertise in the geospatial and remote sensing sciences.

nauticAi is a maritime startup from Finland, specializing in affordable intelligent awareness solutions for ship operators. The company’s BOQA-solution (Bridge Operations Quality Assurance) automates the Operational Quality Assurance of maritime operations with proven methods from the flight industry. A few key components in their solution include open weather data from NOAA and Finnish FMI, Internet of Things (IoT) technology, and a serverless AWS architecture using AWS Lambda and Amazon Aurora. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, we invited Capt. Henrik Ramm-Schmidt, CEO and founder of nauticAi, to share the story of nauticAi with us.

Managing water crises is one of the Sustainable Development Goals and the decline in the available quality and quantity of fresh water is ranked as one of the top ten most serious societal risks by the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Risks report. Using satellite imagery available through the AWS Open Data Program and the AWS Cloud, BlueDot Observatory is establishing a global monitoring system for all at-risk water bodies. This monitoring reveals a sad truth – the total loss of water bodies is in the not too distant future.

We invited Anze Zupanc, a data scientist who manages the BlueDot Observatory at Sinergise, to share how the AWS Open Data Program and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative support this work.

Amazon today announced the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative to promote sustainability research, innovation, and problem solving by making key data easily accessible and even more widely available. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative leverages Amazon Web Services’ technology and scalable infrastructure to stage, analyze, and distribute data, and is a joint effort between the AWS Open Data and Amazon Sustainability teams.

GREENSPIN is a startup company from Würzburg, Germany, that works in the area of data analytics for better agriculture. In this blog post, Dr. Sebastian Fritsch tells us how GREENSPIN is using Earth Observation data available via the Registry of Open Data on AWS to improve agricultural practices. Check out the Q&A with Dr. Sebastian Fritsch from GREENSPIN.

Achieving sustainable development and addressing local and national needs requires access and analysis of large datasets and the use of complex tools and algorithms. This creates barriers for many users, particularly for communities in developing countries where resources for data storage and data analysis are limited. The African Regional Data Cube (ARDC), a new data management technology developed on AWS, hopes to address this challenge by building capacity in those communities to access large datasets in support of their local and national needs framed around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the broader development priorities.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, approximately three billion people in the world rely on both wild-caught and farmed seafood as their primary source of protein; yet the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that eighty-five percent of marine fish stocks are either fully exploited or overfished. To combat this, the annual Fishackathon, first organized by the U.S. Secretary of State’s Office of Global Partnerships in 2014 and organized this year in partnership with HackerNest, took place in over 40 cities around the globe.

A guest post by Steven Ramage, Group on Earth Observations (GEO) The environment is measured with precision through Earth Observation (EO) satellite and in-situ – and the global community is leveraging this investment by accessing the information for free. The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), developed over the last decade, makes more than […]