Taking sustainable development to new heights: FAO and Google shed light on partnership to utilize satellite data

Numerous applications of satellite technology in facilitating natural resource management and contributing to sustainable development were highlighted during a side event on 20 November at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, jointly organized by the Permanent Missions of Israel and France with FAO.

The Permanent Representatives of Israel, Danny Danon, and France, François Delattre, opened the side event, which featured presentations on “Vegetation and Environment monitoring on a New Micro-Satellite” (VENµS), a joint France-Israel satellite project with a scientific and a technological mission. Some of the objectives from the VENµS scientific mission include analyzing surface under various environmental and human factors and validating various ecosystem functioning models.

The event also featured briefings on the FAO-Google partnerships in e-Agriculture. Lorenzo De Simone, FAO Information Technology Officer, and Gino Miceli, Senior Software Engineer at Google, presented the ongoing progress and results of the collaboration between FAO and Google to make high-resolution satellite data more accessible to resource managers and researchers.

De Simone informed that the FAO-Google collaboration has already resulted in eight FAO applications utilizing the Google Earth Engine (GEE) since the two entered into a strategic partnership in 2015. Some of the joint projects underway include Collect Earth, augmented visualization of land monitoring data, regional mapping of agricultural water use, and monitoring and risk mapping tool for locust presence. De Simone highlighted the importance of combining the use of satellite data with FAO’s field presence to respond to the needs from countries and to validate the data collected by “ground truthing”.

Miceli briefed the audience on various development projects powered and aided by GEE, while highlighting the synergistic value of the collaboration, in which Google allows data and processing power to be easily accessible while FAO devises ways to extract useful information with its technical knowledge and expertise. Miceli noted that such a complementary partnership can enable stakeholders to produce actionable intelligence that can help deliver sustainable development.

Also speaking at the event was Carla Mucavi, the Director of the FAO Liaison Office to the United Nations, who noted the importance of utilizing technology to accelerate the progress of delivering the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.