Achieving Ambitious Climate Goals How Can Marine Geospatial Data Protect Our Oceans While Supporting the Shipping Industry
Editor’s note: This article was written as part of EO Hub – a journalistic collaboration between UP42 and Geoawesome. Created for policymakers, decision-makers, geospatial experts and enthusiasts alike, EO Hub is a key resource for anyone trying to understand how Earth observation is transforming our world. Read more about EO Hub here.
The ocean covers 70% of the planet’s surface. Sailing these high seas are vessels transporting over 11 billion tons of goods each year. With approximately 90% of global trade relying on maritime transport, finding ways to mitigate the shipping industry’s environmental impact is now imperative.
Sustainability has become a vital part of every industry across the world, and maritime is no different. A paradigm shift towards greener practices is already underway. So, how can we achieve ambitious and necessary climate goals while balancing the need for ocean protection and the importance of maritime trade? Marine geospatial data can help us to get there.
Is Shipping Sustainable?
The maritime industry, while crucial for global trade, currently faces significant sustainability challenges.
In an era where climate is at the forefront of global discussions, the industry is under increasing pressure to adopt sustainable practices.
If shipping were a “country,” it would be the sixth largest emitter. Global shipping is responsible for around 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (more than Germany)–a figure that could rise to 17% by 2050 if left unchecked– so it is a crucial sector to decarbonize.
Within the EU, maritime transport produces 13.5% of all transport-related greenhouse gas emissions, second only to road transport. These statistics paint a worrying picture of the industry’s environmental impact.
In its current state, the shipping industry is far from sustainable. Despite some progress, such as a 40% reduction in carbon intensity from 2008 to 2018, the industry’s reliance on fossil fuels like heavy fuel oil remains a barrier to true sustainability.
Right now, the sector is at a crossroads, with the potential to transform itself into a more environmentally responsible force.
How To Make Shipping More Sustainable
We’re at a pivotal time for climate action across the world. So, what does this mean for shipping? To chart a course toward a greener future, the sector must embrace a multi-faceted approach that combines technological innovation, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance.
Steps in the Right Direction
Some progress has already been made. In July 2023, Member States of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the global regulatory body for shipping, adopted the Revised Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Strategy that sets a sectoral target of net-zero emissions by or around 2050. This led to the aforementioned 40% decrease in carbon intensity of international shipping between 2008 and 2018.
Despite these positive steps, the industry is still falling short of its sustainability goals. A recent report indicates that the shipping sector is off track to meet its target of having zero-emission fuels account for 5% of all fuels by 2030. This shortfall is a serious wake-up call, highlighting the urgent need for accelerated action across the entire maritime ecosystem.
Green Shipping: Radical Transformation
How can shipping become truly more sustainable? By embracing the concept of green shipping, which prioritizes environmental responsibility while maintaining global trade.
This includes:
- Accelerating the adoption of zero-emission fuels and technologies
- Leveraging data analytics for optimized route planning and vessel performance
- Fostering greater collaboration across the industry to drive collective action
The adoption of alternative fuels, such as LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas), biofuels, and eventually zero-emission options like hydrogen and ammonia, is paramount. Simultaneously, the industry must accelerate the implementation of energy-efficient vessel designs, leveraging advanced hull technologies and propulsion systems to significantly reduce fuel consumption. Digitalization and smart shipping solutions, powered by geospatial data, AI, and IoT, offer unprecedented opportunities to optimize routes, manage cargo, and minimize idle time, further driving down emissions and operational costs. We’ll be looking at marine geospatial data next.
This shift requires substantial investment and collaboration across the industry, from fuel producers to shipping companies.
The Green Shipping Challenge, launched at COP27, highlights the urgency for stakeholders to commit to concrete actions that will propel us toward these cleaner alternatives. It encourages countries, ports, companies, and other maritime stakeholders to make concrete commitments towards decarbonizing the shipping sector in line with the 1.5°C temperature goal.
Harnessing Marine Geospatial Data to Protect Our Oceans
Marine geospatial data is a game-changer for ocean protection, and we’re just scratching the surface of its potential.
What Is Marine Geospatial Data?
It encompasses a wide range of information crucial for the shipping industry and includes many technologies, such as:
- Satellite Imagery: With satellites like Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-3 at our disposal, we can monitor our oceans like never before. For instance, Sentinel-1 uses radar to pierce through clouds and ice, making it invaluable for tracking ship movements and monitoring sea ice. Meanwhile, Sentinel-2’s stunning 10-meter resolution imagery lets us spot changes in coastal habitats in real time.
- AIS (Automatic Identification System) Data: AIS is a key part of maritime safety and tracking. It provides real-time information on vessel positions, speed, and course. Satellite AIS (S-AIS) extends this capability globally, offering coverage in remote ocean areas.
- IoT (Internet of Things) Data: The maritime industry is increasingly adopting IoT devices for various applications:
- Smart containers that monitor temperature, humidity, and shock
- Engine performance sensors
- Fuel consumption trackers
- Weather stations on ships
- SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) Data: SAR satellites like TerraSAR-X can detect ships and oil spills through clouds and darkness, enhancing maritime surveillance capabilities.
- GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) Data: Precise positioning information from GPS, Galileo, and other satellite navigation systems is fundamental for accurate navigation and tracking.
- Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) Data: Used primarily in the fishing industry to track vessel locations and activities, VMS helps to combat illegal fishing.
- LiDAR Data: While primarily used for coastal mapping, LiDAR can provide detailed information on port infrastructure and nearshore environments.
- Meteorological and Oceanographic Data: Information on weather patterns, sea states, currents, and wave heights is critical for route optimization and safety. This data often comes from a combination of satellite observations, buoys, and numerical models.
What Can Marine Geospatial Data Be Used For?
The integration of these diverse data types, often through cloud-based EO platforms like UP42, is enabling the shipping industry to make more informed decisions, optimize routes, reduce environmental impact, and enhance safety.
1. Optimizing Routes for Efficiency and Emissions Reduction
Smart routing is the future of sustainable shipping. By leveraging high-resolution satellite data and advanced AI algorithms, we can optimize shipping routes to minimize fuel consumption and emissions.
AIS data is incredibly useful for enriching maritime analysis. UP42 offers easy access to AIS Historical Vessel Tracks via the Spire Historical Vessel Track API. You can use it to delve into the past and look at vessel movements on a global scale, dating back to 2011.
Knowing more about routes, both past and present thanks to geospatial data, facilitates efficient route planning and could potentially slash fuel consumption. Imagine ships navigating through optimal currents, avoiding ecologically sensitive areas, and arriving at ports just in time – all thanks to geospatial-informed route planning.
2. Monitoring and Protecting Marine Ecosystems
Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor but support over 25% of marine life. It’s clear the welfare of marine life should be a priority in our efforts to protect our oceans.
However, they face countless threats, including entanglement in fishing gear, habitat destruction, and noise pollution from human activities.
Geospatial data though, can help ships avoid sensitive marine habitats while monitoring coral reefs, track harmful algal blooms, and assess the health of the oceans. SAR technology can detect oil spills through clouds and in darkness, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 provide us with detailed imagery for tracking changes in coastal habitats, monitoring coral reef health, and detecting harmful algal blooms. This data helps shipping companies avoid areas of ecological sensitivity and adjust their routes accordingly.
3. Enhancing Maritime Safety and Security
Safety at sea is paramount. Geospatial data is informing maritime and port security strategies for the shipping industry while simultaneously helping us to meet critical climate goals.
Satellite-based Automatic Identification System (S-AIS) allows us to track ships in real-time, even in the most remote corners of our oceans. Unlike AIS, S-AIS is the term used to describe when satellites are used to detect AIS signatures.
This isn’t just about tracking ships though; it’s about predicting their behavior. We can now spot threats to marine ecosystems and ocean security—forecasting potential collisions, identifying suspicious activities, and predicting illegal fishing hotspots.
Combining different data types, such as AIS data with weather parameters and satellite imagery, means shipping companies can choose the most fuel-efficient, environmentally-conscious, as well as safest route possible.
How can you do all this, in practice though?
UP42 enables you to track, predict, and optimize maritime activity through a variety of data types and analytics tools. Below is an example workflow that brings AIS data from ExactEarth and SPOT 6/7 data from OneAtlas, together with raster tiling, ship detection, and ship identification tools.
Such specialist out-of-the-box maritime algorithms, such as ship detection, enable you to get from maritime data to actionable insights in seconds.
The Dual Challenge: Sustainability and Economic Growth
Now that we’ve seen where the issues lie and what solutions marine geospatial data holds, it’s clear that a balance needs to be found.
On the one hand, we’ve got an industry that’s the backbone of global trade, moving a mind-boggling 90% of the world’s goods. It’s the unsung hero of our global economy, keeping shelves stocked and businesses running.
But the shipping industry’s role in global commerce and its environmental footprint are at odds right now. Yes, the maritime sector is indispensable to our global economy. Yet, this same industry relies on fossil fuels, particularly heavy fuel oil.
The challenge lies in transforming the shipping industry into a champion of sustainability without sacrificing its economic importance. This requires a complete shift – embracing alternative fuels, optimizing routes through geospatial data, and investing in energy-efficient vessel designs.
The Path to Meeting Ambitious Climate Goals
Balancing the need for ocean protection with the importance of maritime trade is going to be a tricky, but necessary journey.
By committing to these transformative strategies, the maritime industry can lead the charge in combating climate change while ensuring a resilient future for global trade. The industry must view sustainability not as a regulatory burden, but as an opportunity for innovation and long-term resilience. Imagine a world where massive container ships glide across the oceans, powered by clean energy, navigating optimized routes that avoid sensitive marine habitats. That’s not just a pipe dream – it’s the future we need to be working towards.
As we sail towards ambitious targets like protecting 30% of our oceans by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, the shipping industry has the opportunity to lead by example, demonstrating that economic growth and environmental stewardship can go hand in hand. It’s time to chart a course for a sustainable future, full steam ahead!
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Urban Planning’s New Frontier: The Transformative Power of Satellite Imagery
Editor’s note: This article was written as part of EO Hub – a journalistic collaboration between UP42 and Geoawesome. Created for policymakers, decision-makers, geospatial experts and enthusiasts alike, EO Hub is a key resource for anyone trying to understand how Earth observation is transforming our world. Read more about EO Hub here.
Urban planning has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past half-century, driven largely by revolutionary advances in satellite technology and geospatial analysis. What once required months of ground surveys and manual mapping can now be accomplished in days or even hours, with unprecedented accuracy and detail. This technological leap has arrived at a critical moment in human history, as cities worldwide grapple with unprecedented growth, environmental challenges, and the pressing need for sustainable development.
In this article, we’ll explore the transformative role of satellite imagery in urban planning, from its historical foundations to its current applications and future potential.
What Did We Do Before Satellite Imagery?
Before the advent of aerial and satellite technology, urban planners relied heavily on ground-based surveying techniques that were inherently time-consuming and labor-intensive. It was only in the early 20th century when urban planners started to gain access to traditional aerial photography which allowed them to view cities from above. This new perspective was a significant step forward because, for the first time, urban planners could gain real contextual awareness of the terrain, collecting information on land use, agricultural management, forestry, pollution and conservation, wildlife management, and much more. However, it was still quite expensive, offered limited coverage, and suffered from many of the challenges that come when your datasets are fragmented and incomplete.
This made it difficult to integrate different data sources and consider complex planning scenarios – reducing the speed, scale, and comprehensiveness of any development projects. These constraints often resulted in reactive rather than proactive planning approaches, as planners lacked the tools to effectively monitor and predict urban growth patterns. Interventions based on incomplete information have been shown to exaggerate various unexpected externalities that could have been avoided if the right data was more accessible.
In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of progress with platforms like UP42 starting to aggregate these services and resources, enabling them to offer aerial imagery affordably and at a very high resolution, making many of these use cases more accessible for urban planners of all kinds. This has made a significant difference to how urban planners work and it often serves as a gateway to satellite-based imagery which has gone on to fundamentally transform the practice of urban planning, ushering in a new era of data-driven decision-making and comprehensive spatial analysis.
Modern Applications of Satellite Imagery for Urban Planning
Satellite imagery has emerged as an indispensable tool in modern urban planning, offering planners and decision-makers a dynamic, bird’s-eye view of urban landscapes that can be analyzed across multiple temporal and spatial scales. At the forefront of this technological revolution are high-resolution optical satellites such as Pleiades which can capture images with resolutions as fine as 50cm, allowing planners to discern individual trees, cars, and even smaller urban features. This level of detail has transformed how we approach urban analysis, enabling precise measurement of building footprints, accurate assessment of infrastructure conditions, and detailed monitoring of urban development patterns.
However, optical imagery represents just one facet of satellite technology’s contribution to urban planning. The introduction of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has provided planners with capabilities that would have seemed like science fiction just decades ago. Unlike optical sensors, SAR can penetrate clouds and operate in darkness, offering consistent monitoring capabilities regardless of weather conditions or time of day. This technology has proven invaluable for monitoring urban subsidence, tracking structural deformation, and assessing flood risks – critical capabilities in an era of increasing climate uncertainty.
These technological capabilities have found practical application in countless urban planning initiatives worldwide. Cities are using satellite-derived data to optimize public transportation routes, plan green corridors, and assess the impact of new developments on local ecosystems. The technology has proved particularly valuable in rapidly growing urban areas, where traditional planning methods struggle to keep pace with development.
Another common use case is to monitor urban expansion and its environmental impacts. Planners can track changes in vegetation cover, identify areas of informal settlement, and assess the effectiveness of green space initiatives. This information has proven invaluable for creating more sustainable and resilient urban environments.
Lastly, the integration of these various satellite technologies has led to profound changes in how we approach land use and land cover analysis. Where once planners relied on infrequent surveys and educated guesswork, they can now monitor urban change in near-real-time. This capability has proven particularly valuable in rapidly growing cities, where understanding the pace and pattern of urban expansion is crucial for sustainable development.
All of these applications are enabled not just by the access to high-quality satellite imagery from platforms like UP42, but also by improvements to how this data can be analyzed and applied to urban challenges. By connecting to the UP42 API, urban planners can integrate different data sources, run sophisticated analyses, and validate those results without having to have all the computational power on-site. This drastically improves their ability to scale their work and goes a long way to improving decision-making across a wide range of different metrics.
What Will the Future of Urban Planning Look Like?
The coming decade promises a remarkable evolution in satellite technology that will further redefine our capacity for urban observation and analysis. New constellation systems, comprising hundreds of small satellites working in concert, are set to provide near-continuous monitoring of urban areas. These systems will overcome one of the most significant limitations of current satellite technology: temporal resolution. Instead of capturing images every few days or weeks, these constellations will offer multiple daily passes over urban areas, enabling near-real-time monitoring of urban dynamics.
The advancements in sensor technology have the potential to be equally revolutionary. Next-generation sensors could offer unprecedented spectral and spatial resolution, capable of detecting subtle changes in urban environments that current systems might miss. Hyperspectral sensors with hundreds of spectral bands will provide detailed material composition analysis, while improved thermal sensors will offer precise monitoring of urban heat patterns and energy efficiency at the building level.
However, perhaps the most transformative development lies not in the satellites themselves but in how we process and analyze their data. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to interpret satellite imagery. These systems will be able to automatically detect and classify urban features, monitor changes, and even predict future development patterns with remarkable accuracy. This automation is particularly significant given the enormous volume of data that new satellite systems will generate – and platforms like UP42 are building capabilities to bring that power to anyone who needs it. AI-powered analysis systems will be capable of processing this data in real-time, alerting planners to significant changes or emerging patterns that require attention. For instance, these systems might automatically detect unauthorized construction, monitor traffic patterns, or identify areas of environmental stress before they become critical issues.
Of course, these technological advances will bring their own challenges. The increasing volume of data will require new approaches to data management and analysis. Privacy concerns will need to be addressed as the resolution and frequency of satellite monitoring increase.
There will also be a growing need for professionals who can bridge the gap between technical expertise and practical urban planning applications. However, if we can thoughtfully integrate them into our existing planning processes and societal norms, the potential is immense. The goal is not to replace human judgment but to enhance it with better data and more sophisticated analysis tools. The cities of the future will be shaped by planners who can effectively combine technological capabilities with human insight and local knowledge.
What Does It Mean for the World?
The future of satellite imagery in urban planning is not just about providing better technology – it’s about creating more livable, sustainable, and resilient cities. As these technologies continue to evolve, they will provide unprecedented opportunities to address urban challenges and create better urban environments for future generations.
Most excitingly, it democratizes access to cutting-edge data that can be used to make holistic decisions. For geospatial professionals, this evolution means moving beyond traditional roles as data collectors and mapmakers to become key strategic partners in urban development. The ability to monitor, analyze, and predict urban changes in near-real-time positions these experts at the forefront of addressing some of humanity’s most pressing challenges.
This technology can be a catalyst for significant positive change if we can leverage it to its full potential. As a community, we’re excited to see how insights will help to manage resource allocation, mitigate climate impacts, and ensure equitable development. When working at their best, these technologies enable evidence-based decisions that can improve millions of lives. And as platforms like UP42 make these tools more accessible, communities and stakeholders can participate more meaningfully in planning processes, armed with the same powerful data as traditional decision-makers.
This technological revolution isn’t just about building better cities – it’s about fostering more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient urban futures for us all. And we can’t wait to see what can be unlocked as the industry continues to grow and evolve.
