Resilient and sustainable societies require immediate feedback on their activities in their environment. To make real progress toward Sustainable Development Goals, the global development community needs to track the impact of its work as it unfolds, not years after the project ends. Impact-relevant satellite data is already coming online. Planet is pushing a whole new cadence for satellite data, beginning to provide daily data for the whole world and leading the way for a range of new companies like Astro Digital with a range of new sensors and business models. Companies like Gro Intelligence are helping to turn this data into analysis that can inform decisions. But there isn’t enough “glue” here yet, so the demand is lagging behind our ability to provide smart insights.
Satellite data is being used for natural disaster response. The disaster response community has clear and urgent need and existing capabilities for working with this data. The International Charter on Space and Major Disasters, a mechanism for providing satellite data for disaster response, has been in effect for 17 years. Further, satellite companies like Planet and DigitalGlobe often provide free, open data in the event of disasters, circumventing some of the procurement and licensing challenges that exist in other fields.
Other sectors of global development and humanitarian response are more mixed in their utilization of satellite data. Planet has had some success using data in forest conservation (for example, partnering with local NGO’s to monitor and stop deforestation from illegal mining in Peru) and agricultural development (for example, working with micro-finance institutions on using geospatial data to bring down the cost of lending to smallholder farmers). Satellogic has captured the attention of groups in commercial agriculture, disaster response, and energy looking to better track crop yields or infrastructure and ability to help better inform decision-making in real-time. But, they are a small cohort and the application of geospatial data to sustainable development objectives needs to become much more widespread.
Groups like Nemo Semret’s are starting to fill in the gaps with tools targeted at the needs of specific sectors. Gro Intelligence is an analytics group that structures, contextualizes, and simplifies agricultural data, to make more accessible for wider distribution. They look for the ‘what’ in the data that helps other groups save money, predict rainfall, save lives, etc. There aren’t enough of these groups yet, and they are needed, because nonprofits lack the technical wherewithal to take advantage of the growing capacity.
As Planet and soon, Astro Digital, add capacity, they’re realizing they can’t just build it; there exists the need to build capacity to analyze and apply geospatial data in the development sector. While there is still a disconnect between the enormous potential for improved satellite data to help achieve sustainable development objectives and humanitarian organizations’ ability to use the data in practice, pioneering applications are beginning to break down those barriers and lead to new solutions.
In order to tighten the feedback loop and broaden reach, it’s critical for these new efforts to apply satellite data by:
- Getting the application right. Tools need to go beyond a general index and offer timely operational data in a manner that decision-makers can access and understand.
- Getting the licensing right. Development organizations themselves aren’t often the end recipients for the data. They need to be able to share data with local partners and often have a strong preference for data that can be open for broader civil society use.
- Getting the market right. Yet they need to find a sustainable business approach to provide this value added data in a manner that generates enough value to drive revenue or donor support.