EU and Google enlist ordinary people as environmental watchdogs

RNW, 28 July 2010 - 2:46pm | By Willemien Groot

(Photo: Google)

Eye on Earth, GEOSS and Google are planning to monitor the state of the environment. All three organisations plan to measure the influence of human activity on the environment and climate change. The big difference is that the organisations will not only be gathering data from scientists, but involving ordinary people as well.

Way back in 1998, then US Vice President Al Gore dreamed of a digital earth, where information could be gathered. NASA developed the first version and the possibility of creating a precise, accurate image of the state of the planet expanded exponentially with the rise of new social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Direct action

At the zenith of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, a simple Google maps application made a deep impression, even though the idea behind the app was very simple. Anyone could have thought of it, says Ed Parsons of Google UK:

"This is a great example. It was actually an engineer who works at Google but it could have been anyone, who makes use of the fact that the American government published a daily piece of data that shows the extent of the oil slick in the Gulf. And what he does, is he takes that extent and allows you with a little application that he has built on the web to overlay that extent up around any part of the world. You could type in Amsterdam or wherever you are interested in and it will overlay that extent on that particular region".

Mr Parsons says the map and overlay makes far more impression than pages of raw data, although he hastened to add that raw data should always be available. He says it makes the process more transparent and far more attractive for people who want to delve a little deeper.

Conveying the message

Governments have also realised that new media is a powerful tool they can use to help convey their message to the general public. The British government launched a website to support their climate policy. A government application for use with Google Earth shows what would happen to the planet if the temperature were to rise by an average of four degrees Celsius; the results are both confronting and effective.

Interactive

The effects of drought and floods are also relatively easy to map and monitor. Facebook, Twitter and the photo-sharing website Flickr are full of information about the environment and climate change and it reaches millions of people every day. Why not collect all the snippets of information into one place?

Two European websites are working hard to do just that. The European Environmental agency's Eye on Earthwebsite aims to function as a two-way communication platform that combines scientific information with observations made by ordinary people.

The Group on Earth Observations (GEO), which was launched in response to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, is developing a Global Earth Observations System of Systems or GEOSS. GEO members include 81 governments, the European Commission and dozens of intergovernmental organisations whose mandate includes Earth observation and related environmental issues. The project also has the support of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

The JRC's Max Craglia says:

"We are promoting the idea that ordinary people can be providers of data. They know their local environment a lot better than any observing system rotating over the Earth. Bringing together different sources of data about the environment will help us understand the mechanisms of change; one cannot underestimate the importance of the idea. In addition, those billions of people who start monitoring will also develop a keener awareness of their own role in climate change".

Bend the Trend

GEOSS wants to play a global role but Eye on Earth is focused on Europe. The EU Environmental Agency (EEA) is publishing all available data about water and air quality and will add data on biodiversity and noise pollution later on.

The Bend the Trend website, launched by the EEA, is a social climate movement that aims to inform and inspire people to take action to combat climate change.

The success or failure of all the initiatives depend on their perceived trustworthiness says the EEA's Jeff Huntington: "As we get more and more into this way of thinking and working, I think the process that will become self-regulating. The final result will be a lot better than we have today."

Mr Huntington says the information provided by ordinary people or amateur scientists is not necessarily of inferior quality to data gathered by professional scientists. One source, even if it is scientific, is never enough.

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