Climate change, increased urbanization and the impacts of natural disasters are large-scale, complex challenges to overcome. Designing and maintaining greener buildings, and cities, and creating more sustainable processes will be a key part of addressing these challenges. The foundation for more sustainable development requires accurate and up-to-date data. Thankfully, geospatial data is being collected more rapidly and more accurately than ever before. This session will highlight how digital assets, geospatial information and other sources of data can be used to address global challenges, and where the potential for transformative workflows begins.
Session moderated by Scott Simmons, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Building Resilient Smart Sustainable Cities
Urbanization in Africa has brought about positive development in the cities in Africa but also has brought in challenges. The cities have information gaps like identifying, tracking and managing public health issues such as sanitation, waste, water, and pollution. With poor urban planning and data gaps, the public health of the residents is threatened. Our presentation will focus on showing how digitized cities using GIS can fill information gaps through identifying, tracking, referring and managing public health, sanitation and solid waste management. Enforcement and revenue collection is improved, we will showcase Lusaka City Council to show how digitization has used GIS data. GIS has been used a tool to monitor the development of infrastructure from the design phase to the time when they are occupied putting into consideration all the standard operating procedures for public health, sanitation and solid waste so as to prevent any health risks that may arise from failing to adhere to said standards such as water pollution and subsequent disease outbreaks like cholera.
Mobile mapping of properties in real time during city authorities has been incorporated in the tool to ensure accuracy of the data sets to be used in decision making.
Gertrude Namitala, Trudigital Technologies
How to Strengthen Environmental Stewardship in Urban Areas Through Novel Satellite Technology.
While urban populations continue to grow, cities are ultimately confined in space – a space which needs to accommodate a wide diversity of social, ecological and economic functions. Cities worldwide face the ultimate design challenge – to create integrated urban environments that balance between growth ambitions and comply with new standards for green growth, promoting biodiversity, mitigating climate change while supporting inclusiveness and quality of life.
Urban green/blue spaces are cornerstones of this design challenge, and they play a central role for developing more sustainable, robust, and resilient cities. However local authorities in the US, and worldwide, lacks the tools needed to comprehensively assess the state and dynamics of urban green/blue spaces, which is critical to ensure timely and proper management of existing green areas and inform policy goals and objectives with precision.
In this presentation we will show how the latest Earth Observation (EO) technology, cloud-based infrastructure and machine learning can be applied as effective and integrated tools to assess the state and condition of urban environments at scale and contribute to answer both quantitative and qualitative questions about urban green/blue infrastructure – questions which are otherwise difficult to answer in the field. We will shed light on the technology and provide practical use case examples of applied use of EO to underpin urban green/blue management and planning.
Mads Christensen, DHI Water & Environment
Utilizing Reality Capture for Climate Change and Disaster Response
The amount of environmental disasters globally has increased 140% over the past 5 years alone. In 2021 global weather disasters cost us 101 billion. As climate-related disasters continue to become more common, they also have a significant negative effect on vulnerable populations. For example, 92% of mortality from natural disasters is in low and middle-income countries. The use of reality capture technology, such as drones, robots and cameras, can spur faster aid cycles and sustainable development.
This talk will discuss examples of how reality capture technology has been used in disaster planning, response and sustainable development. We will also highlight examples of how environmental organizations are using remote sensing combined with reality capture tools for better situational awareness and planning for ecosystem conservation and resilience.
Rebecca Lehman, DroneDeploy
