Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Entwicklung und Humanitäre Hilfe
Outside view (EN)
Row after row, evoking a sound recording studio or a power plant control room, in a windowless underground room in the heart of the scientific establishment. Beneath each gauge is a neat label: Sea Ice, Ocean Temperature, CO2, Ozone, Nitrous Oxides, Aerosols, Sea Level, Permafrost. Each summarizes a different group of specialist sensors or cameras making carefully calibrated measurements from orbit. New gauges are added every year: Methane Plumes, Forest Mass, Sea Salinity, Phytoplankton. These are the early warning indicators, each the first link in a chain that connects us to disaster.
Outside view by Nick Appleyard
The Climate Office of European Space Agency (ESA) analyses satellite records back to the early days of a cooperative space economy in the 1970s. Data scientists convert instrument readings into statistics that ebb and flow with the seasons, feeding them onwards to the scientific community and the global assessments of the IPCC.
Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people. Vulnerable communities who have historically contributed the least to current climate change are disproportionately affected. – IPCC Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policymakers A.2
Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people. Vulnerable communities who have historically contributed the least to current climate change are disproportionately affected.
– IPCC Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policymakers A.2
A needle creeps across a dial. A siren blares, emergency lighting kicks in. We are outside the safe zone. The command is heard: “Will somebody please shut off that noise?” and silence returns, but a new bulb now flashes its accusation on the desktop, joining its fellows which each pulse alongside. Every needle is in its red zone, but at least it’s quiet now that the leadership have shut off the alarm.
A button so powerful that it must be surrounded by yellow and black warning stripes, with glass to be broken Only in the Case of an Emergency. But the reports confirm that this is indeed that moment and so, after a short hesitation and an intake of breath, the glass is broken. The button is pressed. In the Control Room the screens now all show the same scene, as the world’s resources swing into action and focus onto a single point. In that moment only this situation matters. Normal priorities are overridden. Crisis response is in action.
Negotiated in 2000, the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters is a triumph of cooperation across boundaries. A consensus that in these critical moments there is no time to discuss and agree, no time for political or economic negotiation, because lives are at risk and we cannot wait. Emergency responders and local authorities need immediate support: the downlinks of multiple satellites are quickly assembled into maps and alerts, layering their insights to feed into the crisis control centres that direct the action on the ground. Briefly, the humanitarian need overrides all others.
Disaster risk is increasing. More intense shocks and stresses are exacerbating inequality and derailing progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. Hazard events are becoming more intense and frequent in all regions of the world. When vulnerability and exposure levels are high, then these hazard events are much more likely to become disasters. – UNDRR Global Assessment Report of Disaster Risk Reduction: Special Report 2024
Disaster risk is increasing. More intense shocks and stresses are exacerbating inequality and derailing progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. Hazard events are becoming more intense and frequent in all regions of the world.
When vulnerability and exposure levels are high, then these hazard events are much more likely to become disasters.
– UNDRR Global Assessment Report of Disaster Risk Reduction: Special Report 2024
The Charter is activated almost weekly now, as countries around the world confront one natural disaster overlapping into the next.
But how can we act on these priorities before the fire spreads, before the dam breaks, before the crops fail? Our contribution to humanitarian action will be more effective, more impactful, and also less costly, if we have looked ahead and anticipated the risks of a developing situation, far ahead of the moment of crisis.
The farm manager steps out, her arms exposed to the morning sun, cap and sunglasses shading her eyes. Reaching for the backpack on the passenger seat she opens a laptop. After a few seconds, connected through the antenna on the truck roof, a bright blue spot shows her position on a map with the latest reports. She scans the complex swarm of slowly moving points representing ships outside the harbour, trains and trucks bringing the containers to and from the port, and the warehouses and gantry cranes that sustain the flow of the whole region’s economy. All is ready. This industrial commotion is a stark contrast to the rural village just an hour away, where the fresh crop has just been harvested and packed. Another dashboard shows the shipment in preparation. The container is sealed, the certification needed by the customers and by the bank are in progress. It will set out in another hour.
ESA’s Space Solutions programme has fostered over five hundred new digital services over the past fifteen years, each solving a specific need in a business which has found a use for satellites in its daily operations. In our world of market economies, each has proved itself useful to a customer and worthy of their effort and investment. It is in the nature of space that these services address particular kinds of needs. It really helps if you can see the sky, so this is most likely to be of help for activity and assets outdoors. Satellites can operate in parallel over a wide area, so the value is most apparent for land use, for extended infrastructure or for moving vehicles and people. And space is often the only option where coverage is poor from ground-based systems like the mobile telecom network, most obviously the case at sea and in the air.
This leads us to use space around the edges of the digital economy. And so we find that half of these projects, even though they are developing commercial services, are also targeting climate and the green transition. Fully eighty per cent can be linked to UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.[1]
So now we arrive at my first question to you, the humanitarian community. If you could wish for any information to support your work or directly to empower vulnerable people, if you could conjure any insights or forecasts, any coordination of effort, any timely alert,
Quite likely your reply will be technically possible: among the thousands of innovation projects and product ideas that I have seen over two decades, it has been very rare that the last problem to solve was one of engineering.
Quite likely this solution may rely on the capabilities of space, and so perhaps we in ESA could partner with you, get it built, demonstrate it working. Maybe we already did.
Those things are, in the 21st century, the easy part. Maybe you’re familiar with geospatial mapping and decision systems used by international organizations, development aid agencies, humanitarian and emergency services. We have helped to get many of these started. Many wishes have already been fulfilled, and I encourage you to make the maximum use of what has already been done.
And so, to my second question. If your wishes can be so easily engineered,
I have heard many answers to this question. I am told that there is no time, no money to innovate, because resources and people on the ground are already stretched to their limits. I am told that responsibility, liability and funds are too scattered, too hard to assemble. I hear ethical concerns about surveillance, about transparency and mistrust, the risk that data about people who are already vulnerable may be misused. I hear doubt that the very same tools developed to pursue conflict and support military action may also be used to protect populations and uphold their rights. And I hear that the humanitarian arena is no place for commerce, that the priorities of business and the population are somehow intrinsically opposed.
I end this reflection on a note of humility. Dealing with these concerns is the hard part, for which I do not try to offer simple solutions. Perhaps, though, we can find a way forwards together.
[1] ESA Space Solutions: Tackling Societal Challenges 2024
Dr Nick Appleyard is the Head of Applications and Solutions at European Space Agency. His challenge is to find ways that the rich technical capabilities of the space sector can be applied to solve the problems of society. This is achieved by supporting European business ideas that will succeed and grow by virtue of the value that they offer to their users and customers.
Nick has been leading public innovation programmes for almost twenty years, across the full breadth of the digital economy ranging from sanitation to special effects and from hospitals to ski slopes.
He is based in UK, but is increasingly delocalized across Europe.
Inspired by Tom Fletcher’s statement of commitment to the humanitarian community when he resumed his position as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (OCHA) in November 2024, this channel provides expert views and impulses that highlight the current importance of listening, ef
