The Eye on Earth Mission: From a Moment to a Movement

Achim Steiner is United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Below are his remarks to the Eye on Earth Summit, Abu Dhabi, on 13 December 2011.

Senior figures from the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, indigenous leaders, the private sector, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, we meet here in Abu Dhabi, amid the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the unification of the United Arab Emirates. Next year we mark twenty years after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and another fortieth anniversary—forty years after the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment that also established the environment programme of the United Nations, or UNEP.

The last forty years have seen remarkable progress in terms of humanity’s understanding of the processes and systems that day in and day out make planet Earth habitable. This in part has been propelled by technological advances.

It is just over fifty years since Explorer VII, widely viewed as the first Earth observation satellite, was launched by the United States to measure the amount of heat reflected by Earth back into space. By 2005, close to seventy were in orbit from an ever growing number of space agencies, including ones from China and India. And just over two years ago the United Arab Emirates launched its first Earth-observing satellite.

With rapidly advancing computing power and monitoring networks across our lands, air and oceans, the world is awash with data, including environmental data. By some estimates, the amount of data held in the world is 315 times the number of grains of sand, and continuing to grow.

Managing, processing and making these volumes of data available in user-friendly ways and in the service of sustainable development is one of the global challenges and one of the issues for Eye on Earth—and a key input to assisting Rio+20 in June next year. But there are many others.

Data and Citizen Science

In some cases the data or knowledge gap is not so much volume but the paucity of reliable data: even with all this information and high-tech systems, many areas of the planet remain unmapped or not sufficiently monitored for the accelerating environmental change witnessed almost everywhere.

In respect to rivers, a lot of data on flows, water withdrawals and the recharge rates of underground aquifers are patchy (to say the least) across river basins and freshwater shared by more than two nations. Information on water quality can be even more challenging, especially in developing countries. Meanwhile, only 0.1 per cent of the oceans have been mapped on a scale as detailed as a hectare. And large tracts of the seafloor, such as most of the southern ocean, have not been mapped at all—we have better data for the surface of the moon.

Sometimes it is a case of joining up disparate networks and data sets—there is no globally interconnected information network specific to floods, for example, but there could be with political ambition.

Sharing data is also key. The oil and gas industry, for example, carries out environmental impact assessments, including in the Gulf region. This in turn generates large amounts of data on species such as dolphins, as well as on whole ecosystems such as coral reefs and seagrass beds.

But much of this vital data is often lost to researchers and policymakers for a range of reasons, from privacy considerations up to the fact that such surveys and the underlying raw data are often not standardised.

Some continents have special and urgent capacity-building needs. By some estimates, about 25 per cent of the Global Climate Observing System surface stations in east and southern Africa are not working and most of the remaining stations elsewhere in Africa are functioning in a less than desirable manner. Around a fifth of the ten upper-air network stations are in a similar state.

Overall, it is estimated that Africa needs two hundred automatic weather stations and a major effort to rescue historical data, a significant amount of which remains in paper form rather than digitised for deployment in modern forecasting and climate supercomputer modelling. This has implications for the global climate supercomputer models as well as for predicting droughts and floods in order to improve early warnings of disasters.

These are historical challenges, but new ones alongside new opportunities are emerging as a result of the technological age.

Harnessing “citizen” science, including networks of mobile-phone users, is also part of the environmental data debate. It is an area identified as a promising opportunity by Global Pulse, a new initiative by Ban ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General. The public and their cell phones could, if encouraged, become early warning systems for droughts and floods, as well as for forest fires and wildlife poaching.

In India, Project Suraya—which is linked to UNEP’s Atmospheric Brown Cloud initiative—is using special cell phones in villages to measure levels of the black carbon emitted by cooking stoves. The project is also linking to satellites with the aim of measuring how more efficient stoves are simultaneously improving public health while providing climate benefits in the atmosphere.

Eye on Earth Special Initiatives

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, UNEP is delighted to have been a partner with the authorities in the United Arab Emirates and Abu Dhabi on the Eye on Earth Summit. UNEP and the UN system as a whole congratulates the organisers on the eight Special Initiatives proposed as contributions to Rio+20 and beyond.

The Access for All initiative, aimed at making environmental data available for all citizens, is one idea that is rapidly maturing in advance of Rio+20. It is a natural ally of the Green Economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication and the institutional framework for sustainable development.

The opportunity to implement globally Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, building on the work done in Europe and Central Asia through the 1998 Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, is gaining a great deal of traction among governments and civil society.

I am delighted that here at the Eye on Earth Summit the Eye on Earth network involving partners including the European Environment Agency, the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), the Abu Dhabi Environment Agency, and UNEP is officially launched. It is part of this head of steam towards greater public access to environmental data, including powerful mapping portals—a contribution to what we call UNEP Live.

If you visit the Eye on Earth exhibition centre here in Abu Dhabi you can see this extraordinary new network and its potential in operation. For example, there are maps showing known locations of turtle nesting sites near Abu Dhabi, overlaid with oil and gas operations, dugong habitats and multiple additional maps—ranging from wave heights to human population. Knowledge and data are displayed in a way that can assist planners as well as those managing, say, an oil spill or other environmental challenge.

There are also big questions that need answering in order to catalyse sustainable development and which could serve as a focus for the Special Initiatives. Take the science of biodiversity, for example. The world community needs to understand, at the global level, the potential impact of the loss of biodiversity on human development.

In this conference hall, there are the key elements of a transformative partnership, in short a global network of networks that could, if well-coordinated, deliver the necessary resources through public–private partnerships that lower the barriers to collaboration as part of multilateral platforms.

Specifically, the Eye on Biodiversity initiative, for example, could, by linking up networks and boosting monitoring of the natural world, improve the ability of countries to go beyond GDP as a measure of wealth. This is an example of how Special Initiatives could work with one another to generate the networks, resources, and policy relevance to drive the Eye on Earth to success.

Indeed, several of the Special Initiatives here could be launched in support of some of the broad cooperative agreements being examined as possible Rio+20 outcomes. UNEP stands ready to assist in realising these initiatives and the transformational aims of Eye on Earth.

Towards Rio+20

Excellencies, distinguished delegates, UNEP is aware of the vital importance of environmental data and knowledge in its work and painfully aware of the gaps that in turn can slow down the policy responses needed as never before on a planet of seven billion people, rising to over nine billion by 2050.

Sound policymaking, able to evolve sustainable development onto a fresh and transformative footing at Rio+20 and beyond, requires sound science, which in turn is underpinned by sound, reliable and timely data.

As the world looks towards Rio+20, and the urgency of embracing a Green Economy, your deliberations here are one of perhaps the big and often overlooked pieces in the overall sustainability puzzle. The outcome from Abu Dhabi and Eye on Earth is the moment to accelerate an understanding of the crucial importance of high-quality, comprehensive environmental data.

But above all it is the moment for a new and fresh effort to bring such data to bear on the extraordinary challenges or age—from climate change to biodiversity loss—in order better to manage the natural, nature-based assets that underpin the wealth, health and, in the final analysis, the prosperity of nations.