In the last 48 hours President Joseph Biden, some 40 other world leaders, and more than 300 businesses have committed to meaningful climate action, including ambitious goals for carbon emissions. The president called upon his peers to “make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.” At Esri, this is our life’s work—balancing human-made systems with the natural world. It’s the reason we make geographic information systems (GIS) technology and support our customers and partners in applying GIS to solving the world’s problems. We recognize the seriousness of the climate crisis and we know full well that technology will be a crucial part of the solutions.
If attendees to the Earth Day summit made the current climate situation sound dire, that’s because there’s a new appreciation in our world for complex problem-solving. We’ve seen what one tiny microbe can do to our planet when we were caught unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic. As difficult as the pandemic has been, there has at least been hope that vaccines might set life back to a relative normal. For climate change, there is no vaccine. And there is no going back. We need to confront the consequences of centuries of shared actions. For government and business, this is our shared responsibility.
There are many reasons for hope. The tools we need to support important climate decisions are available to us. Thousands of organizations, including many Esri customers and partners, have been working for decades to balance issues of the environment and economy, realizing we must do a better job understanding and respecting nature in our decision-making.
· Geospatial analysis has led to the entirety of the ocean being digitally mapped in 3D with data about key indicators such as temperature, salinity, oxygen, and nutrient levels.
· Much like the real-time dashboards that informed the world about COVID-19’s spread, a system is being developed to show progress on the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and bring awareness to the world’s fragile ecosystems.
· GIS technology is being applied to precision agriculture to feed the world without wasting precious resources. It processes giant volumes of data on soil, weather, topography, fertilizer, and pests, as well as the impact of legislation, regulation, farm machinery, and market demand.
· Advanced technologies like remote sensing, drones, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are adding volumes of data to GIS, supporting visualization, analysis, reality capture, and problem solving.
At this moment, we need to use the best science, design, critical thinking, and systems thinking to address our greatest environmental challenges. Geospatial technology integrates these approaches as well as multiple data types and allows us to look at a problem holistically. Geography is not just about seeing a point on a map, but explicitly understanding the relationships among places, people, policies and practices.
Understanding Precedes Climate Action
Our problem-solving needs to involve nature from the beginning, making the planet a stakeholder. I’ve had the privilege of working alongside such global conservation leaders as E.O. Wilson, Jane Goodall, and Peter Raven. These great minds have all used GIS in their work because it helps clarify their questions and guide sustainable decisions.
The climate crisis shows us that nature needs our attention and our best efforts. At Esri, we like to think of GIS as a geospatial nervous system for the planet, one that can help guide an effort like climate resilience by empowering organizations to design with nature. I’m excited that the commitment by the Biden Administration recognizes the need for data and science to inform decisions and actions.
We are embracing the announcement and this week’s turn of events as much-needed steps. We are ready to support the administration and our hundreds of thousands of users who work with geospatial technology to understand and analyze the relationships between the natural and built environment. Together, we are committed to designing a better, more sustainable future. And, I have no doubt the collaborative nature of GIS work will foster new, important connections among and within organizations.
The global commitment to dramatically cut back on carbon emissions will require new approaches, and a much more efficient use of water, food, energy, shelter, and mobility. For business and government, this is uncharted territory.
Undoubtedly, the Biden administration’s carbon emissions plan will bring a difficult but necessary transformation for business, government, and society. It can, however, result in not just environmental benefits but social and economic ones, too. The earth’s woes are inextricably linked to the sustainability of every living thing and as such, nature itself needs to be a key consideration in the choices we make going forward.
As organizations around the world working with complex problems already know, GIS fosters a ground truth, a common operating picture for everyone involved in solving a problem. In the context of climate change, we can use GIS to sort out the complexity. Now is a time for organizations and leaders to be bold, to face the environmental harm of our globalized economies. And that’s the good news of this week’s turn of events–it’s a genuinely promising time for business and government, not only in terms of technology, but in terms of attitude.