Esri is the global market leader in Geographic information Systems (GIS) and Location Intelligence. The company’s innovations continue to support hundreds of thousands of users all over the world in a wide variety of industries. According to Richard Budden, Deputy General Manager at Middle East and Africa, Esri state-of-the-art solutions in location intelligence help global leaders in the public and private sectors to understand climate change, realise the impact on many parts of life, and plan preventive actions.
According to NASA, climate change is a “broad range of global phenomena” that includes warming temperatures, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events. The list includes a wide range of executive’s dossier of unwelcome events: increased incidence of drought, more-devastating storms, resource scarcity, and flooding in cities worldwide. Scientists say adverse effects will intensify in the decades ahead unless governments and businesses take sustained action.
The vast majority of global leaders consider climate change a megatrend that will transform their businesses. Forward-thinking leaders, in both public and private sectors, are taking steps to ensure that their businesses will endure. But many global executives struggle to plan for climate change for lack of data or tools to grasp the problems they will face.
Smart maps show executives the impact of climate change
Business leaders, who are planning multimillion dollar investments, struggle to account for the effects of climate change. Esri’s Mapping and Location Intelligence helps them understand the problem, realise the impact on many parts of life, as well as plan preventive actions.
Esri aims to balance human-made systems with the natural world. Our GIS technology supports customers and partners in applying GIS in order to solve the world’s problems. We recognise the seriousness of the climate crisis, and we know full well that technology will be a crucial part of the solutions.
Different ways to fight climate change
This section covers customer stories from different countries and sectors. With a common objective to fight climate change, each customer found a way they consider suitable for their end-user.
City of Prague: Climate resilience with GIS
In 2015, the City of Prague published a four-year plan with the aim of enhancing long-term resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change. With many paved spaces and built-up areas, the city had been experiencing an increasing number of heat wave events caused by currents of hot air moving from Africa into Europe.
To meet the objectives of their plan, officials from the city’s Institute of Planning and Development (IPR Prague) are leveraging GIS technology to enable them to understand where and how to react to climate challenges. Through one initiative they have integrated information from environmental sensors with health and demographic data, to help identify segments of the population that are at increased risk from high temperatures.
IPR Prague are also using GIS to guide climate mitigation strategies through analysis of 3D models of the city’s microclimates. This helps in understanding potential impacts before any large investment of time and money is made.
With a vision to make Prague completely carbon neutral by 2050, the team plans to collaborate with other city agencies and also include their data in their models, to provide location intelligence into a range of applications. One idea is to model indoor spaces and study energy consumption and cooling of building interiors.
Protecting and managing biodiversity in Egyptian nature reserves
The Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA) has a mission to plan for environmental protection and environmental development projects. This includes most of the Egyptian presidency’s priorities for COP27 such as food security, agriculture, water, waste and energy as well as nature and biodiversity.
Part of its tasks is conserving and securing the natural reserve areas which are the most valuable inherited treasure for human beings. The latter secure the ecosystem of our planet and plays a key role in maintaining its balance, preserving important habitats, building resilience to climate change, providing global food security, maintaining water quality, and conserving natural resources.
EEAA used Esri technology in GIS and remote sensing to provide a quick, efficient, and reliable solution for understanding as well as monitoring the effects of the environment hazards and climate change on the natural reserve areas biodiversity.
The project started with automating the daily monitoring activities of the natural reserves team. Interactive dashboard was then used to enable a complete and instant view of the status, species frequency, and density cover of small mammals, big mammals, birds and vegetation. Finally, image analysis was used for studying the potential geo-environmental hazards related to climate change. This was achieved by generating a drainage network and watersheds for each natural reserve area using a special precast watershed model, and followed by morphometric analysis for these outputs to assess and spot the streams and watersheds that most likely represent a danger.
Geospatial programme for agriculture in Africa
Extreme weather events linked to climate change are threatening food and water security across the globe. Africa, already struggling with low agricultural production and heavily degraded soils, is disproportionally affected by climate change.
According to the World Meteorological Organisation, more than 40 African states have revised their national climate plans to make them more ambitious and add greater commitments to climate adaptation and mitigation. Flooding, sea level rises, increase in temperature, changes in rainfall patterns all directly affect the agricultural landscape.
Through the Geospatial Programme for Agriculture in Africa, Esri is enabling government agencies on the continent to implement a geospatial foundation for increased monitoring and understanding of the changing local conditions in relation to weather and land use patterns, land degradation, water allocation, yield and spread of pest and disease compounded by climate change.
Using a combination of ready-to-use capabilities for extracting water balance and vegetation health indicators from imagery together with streamlined workflows for collecting (ground truth) data in the field or through IoT (Internet of Things) devices allows for near-real time monitoring of water, soil and crop conditions throughout the growing season. Having this data in the hands of decision makers in a timely fashion is crucial for fast decision support and intervention.
Moreover, using a combination of historic, current, and forecasted data, governments now have the ability to run multi-variable suitability and machine learning models to predict changes in crop suitability across the region as well as plan for the agricultural landscape of the future.
Enabling forecasting and having access to predictive models are critical to ensure sustainable agriculture development and improve food security worldwide.
Esri at COP 27
As one of the Top-10 IT companies in the region, Esri is going to hold technology demonstrations during COP 27. This will be in partnership with Microsoft to showcase state-of-the-art GIS solutions include digital twins, smart cities, GeoAI and analytics, machine learning, Geospatial infrastructure, imagery and remote sensing, and location intelligence.
Visit the Esri on the Microsoft booth to discover how location intelligence technology could be a critical part of the solution in the fight against climate change.
To learn more about Esri’s work in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, visit the website.
This article was originally published in our sister publication, Arabian Business.
