FOSS4G and the climate crisis: Let's get to work
Emanuele, Rob
The Paris climate agreement targets limiting our global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial averages. However, there are reports stating that this goal is now "virtually impossible" to achieve, and recent research claims that the planet is already committed to over 2°C of global heating. The effects of this level of warming will be widespread and hard to predict, but one thing is clear - our ability to process and analyze geospatial data in order to monitor, model and manage Earth's natural systems will be key to responding effectively and intelligently to the challenges humanity will face over the next century. We in the open source geospatial community have the opportunity to build the technologies that will be critical to mitigating and adapting to the rising effects of climate change. In this talk I will challenge our amazing community to use its vast talents and capabilities to work towards supplying the future with the data and tools it needs in the fight to protect our Earth. The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world | Australian Academy of Science Greater committed warming after accounting for the pattern effect | Nature Climate Change The Paris climate agreement targets limiting our global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial averages. However, there are reports stating that this goal is now "virtually impossible" to achieve, and recent research claims that the planet is already committed to over 2°C of global heating. The effects of this level of warming will be widespread and hard to predict, but one thing is clear - our ability to process and analyze geospatial data in order to monitor, model and manage Earth's natural systems will be key to responding effectively and intelligently to the challenges humanity will face over the next century. We in the open source geospatial community have the opportunity to build the technologies that will be critical to mitigating and adapting to the rising effects of climate change. In this talk I will challenge our amazing community to use its vast talents and capabilities to work towards supplying the future with the data and tools it needs in the fight to protect our Earth. The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world | Australian Academy of Science Greater committed warming after accounting for the pattern effect | Nature Climate Change Authors and Affiliations – Rob Emanuele, Microsoft Track – Community / OSGeo Topic – FOSS4G for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Level – 1 - Principiants. No required specific knowledge is needed. Language of the Presentation – English
 Let's do that one. I won't be able to see questions while I'm presenting, but I'll get to them after the talk. My name is Robin Manuel. I'm a geospatial architect for Microsoft on the environmental sustainability team in AI for Earth. I want to talk to you today about Phosphor G and the climate crisis. First off, I want to talk a little bit about Microsoft AI for Earth and why we're the diamond sponsor of Phosphor G this year. I know if I was an attendee a couple years back, I might be like, oh, Microsoft, that's an interesting choice. Maybe have a little bit of some thoughts about how Microsoft interacted with open source back in the first decade, in the 21st century. Under the leadership of Satin and Dala, Microsoft owns GitHub and is a big prominent open source software. But specifically around Phosphor G, I'll answer that question by going into our sustainability work. Microsoft is committed to using its technology, its cloud, to build a more sustainable future. Those commitments are specific and there are four specific areas. In 2020, we announced that we were committed to being carbon negative by 2030, and not just that, by 2050 to have removed all the carbon it's ever emitted since its founding in 1975. Committed to being water positive by 2030, and that means that Microsoft will replenish more water than it consumes on a global basis. Committing to zero waste. Our goal is to achieve zero waste for Microsoft's direct operations, products, and packaging by 2030. And also to protect our ecosystems. Committing to protecting more land than we used by 2025. And also as part of this, building and deploying what we're calling a planetary computer. And that's what I work on. I'm an engineer on the team building out the services around our open data and analytics. And all of that is built on Phosphor G. It's very specifically built on an open source and really stands on the shoulders of the giants of this community. So really excited to be able to sponsor this conference and to give our support. And really happy that I can be speaking with you today. But I'm not going to be talking about the planetary computer today. If you're interested, go ahead and see my talk tomorrow where I'll be going over some of the technical details of how we're utilizing open source software and the architecture of planetary computer. What I want to talk to you today about is the climate crisis. So I am very privileged to be working with a number of very smart scientists that are really close to the science of what's going on with the warming climate. And so I wanted to just bring some of the lessons that I have learned, you know, learning from them to this conference. And specifically around some of the results that you can take away from the IPCC report recently in August. The first section of AR6 was released. Some of the misconceptions will be released over the coming year. But this one focused specifically on the physical science basis. And I'll just, you know, ask Dricks like, I'm not an environmental scientist. So this is some of my interpretations of what very smart people have told me. So if I'm incorrect, please correct me in the comments. Go ahead and yell at me. So one of the things, the sort of key takeaways is that, you know, 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial average could be reached within a decade. And it's more likely than not to be breached even in the scenario where we get to net zero by 2050. There's an aggressive cutting of carbon as well as, you know, removing carbon from the air more more likely than not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that number is sort of important because in 2015 during COP 21, there was the Paris Agreement that was entered into force in 2016. And that had a goal of, you know, keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, but preferably below 1.5 degrees Celsius. And it looks like we've already, you know, five years later sort of missed that mark. And then so this isn't part of the IPCC report, but other research, you know, current policies have us missing that by a wide margin where we're on track to reach three degrees Celsius of warming by 2,100. And so it's important to note that the warming, the number that signifies the sort of mean warming of the planet does not mean that like every location will just have that warming, right? It's generally larger over land than in oceans. So based on a location, the warming that's experienced will be significantly different. And you can see in the north, it seems like the warming that would be experienced is a lot greater. And so another thing that was kind of a key takeaway from the IPCC report is that the tipping points are presented with greater confidence and concern. So abrupt potentially catastrophic and irrevisible changes are presented with more specificity and confidence than in previous reports. One example of this, and there's some other research talking about early warning signs around this overturning circulation. And yeah, these things could potentially collapse, disrupting rain. The farmers relying to grow food in Africa and South America making winter's more extreme in Europe and further destabilizing the Greenland ice sheet and the Amazon rainforest. Other examples of tipping points highlighted in the report include rapid melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, permafrost collapse, and permanent forest loss. And while the report considered these events with a low likelihood of happening this century, it also reports with a high confidence that they can't be ruled out. One sort of pretty stark takeaway that hit me was that we've likely already hit 1.5 in warming, but we're also emitting aerosols into the air that have a cooling effect. So we're only experiencing, we're only observing 1.1 degrees Celsius that warming because of the aerosol emissions. And it's important to note that greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere longer than aerosols. So if we were to stop emitting both greenhouse gases and aerosols tomorrow, the aerosols would disappear faster than the greenhouse gases. And so in effect, we would experience warming due to that removal aerosols in the air. But it's not all doom and gloom, there's indication that rapid aggressive emission cuts coupled with carbon dioxide removal, a lot of the stuff that Microsoft is working on being a purchaser in. There was just a nature article published around our processes for trying to really invest in the carbon removal market and do large purchases of carbon removal. But that type of work could limit warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, even if we would dip above or breach 1.5 at some point and then dip down to lower the last part of the century. But I think it's important to talk about it not necessarily as climate change that's happening in the future. This is a climate crisis that's happening right now. One of the things that the IPCC report has been able to take advantage of is the science that's gotten better at attributing weather events, climate events to human-induced climate change. And so they're able to do that for things happening right now. And we can see that the number of hot extreme events has increased already with high confidence. The number of observed change and heavy participation has changed and then also agricultural and ecological droughts. So this is something that's already here. And so I just want to take a moment to say the magnitude of this problem can be super overwhelming. I know that I feel very overwhelmed by it often. And especially with everything that's going on with the pandemic and just the world, it's kind of easy to get kind of discouraged about the outlook. But I want to say that we in the foster G community are positioned to make a difference. I really believe that geospatial data is a critical, irreplaceable asset in the work, not just the work that's going on now, but in all of the future challenges presented by the climate crisis. It will be important. There's the saying that you can't manage what you can't measure and all of the measurements at a planetary scale deal with location and time. And the sensors that we have up in space looking down on our planet are collecting data that's irreplaceable. Like there's nothing else that can kind of give those measurements. So it's really important data in dealing with this crisis. We've made leaps and strides in being able to utilize that data, but I think we have a really long way to go. This isn't sort of a new idea, right? In 2018, keynote Chris Holmes at Foster GNA had a great talk called Towards a Quarieable Earth. And if you haven't seen it, I recommend going. It's still very relevant. And one of the key points of this where he lays out sort of a blueprint of how we go from data to something where you can query anything on the planet is this last part, which is that the GIS and remote sensing is abstracted away. And so I think this is a really important point that we're still very far from, right? Be as geospatial experts, as the people using and building Foster G, open source geospatial software, are the ones responsible for handling that complexity, the complexity of the data and the complexity of the processes that are inherently geospatial. And unless we're delivering something that abstracts away all that technical complexity, we're not quite there yet. And I really believe that the work we do now to make this data and technology easier, faster, more efficient, won't just help with the current challenges, but also set the future up for success. And I think that's really important to keep top of mind because while the climate crisis is here and we're already feeling the effects, the people who will be really dealing with it might be several decades out. And so what can we be doing now that sets those people up for success? And hopefully they're not still scratching their heads about how to find and manipulate geospatial data. That'll be a solved problem. So yeah, a question would be like, what do we build now that would be most useful in the future? We're very far away and who knows what will happen? Who knows what the needs will be? So I think this is, nope, there's not a real answer to this. But what we can do is look at sort of what are the lasting technologies that have been around in previous decades that are still useful today. And I'll just highlight GDAL. The initial release was in June 2000 and so two decades later, it's used everywhere. It's still just so widely used. It solves a problem that is a problem today just like it was a problem in 2000. And so I was having a conversation with Frank Warmerdam, the founder of GDAL, several years back. And I asked him, why did you start GDAL? And he said in a paraphrasing, he was like, well, I looked for the problem that nobody wanted to work on that everybody had. And everybody was having issues with data formats and reading and data in a consistent way. And it was hard work and it was boring work. It wasn't the glamorous work that was going on. But I decided to take that on and solve that problem. And then the community that's built around GDAL continues that to this day, solving those sort of low level IO problems that everybody has. If we didn't have GDAL, it would be a lot harder. But we can solve it sort of in a general way that lets people concentrate on the work that they're getting to. And then so I think that's a huge lesson that I've carried forward. And I hope maybe you can take some inspiration from as well to build lasting solutions, focusing on those hard, fundamental, and potentially boring problems that are keeping everyone from doing more interesting work and shouldering that. And so I think that's what we need to be doing, not necessarily that it's boring work, but there's important foundational work that we need to be doing. And I like to think about it in these four areas where focusing on the data that's available, how do we get those data into the proper formats to be cloud optimized and ready for use, the access, how are people accessing that data, how are people searching for the data that they need? Analytics. There's a wide variety of analytics that you'd want to apply to this data once you find the data that you're interested in, including combining different data sets and how easy is that to do. And then finally, applications because the insights derived from analytics from accessing the data don't mean much unless they're applied to impact specific decisions or optimize certain processes or ultimately manage Earth's natural systems. So I'm just going to talk about data and access today because of time. But so yeah, there's a wide range of types. There's optical imagery, which I think we've got a pretty good handle on. I think Landsat being put up as a cloud optimized geotest was a huge leg up in that effort to make raster data, imagery data really accessible and easy to use. But there's other types, synthetic aperture radar, hyperspectral imagery, point cloud. And all these types are in various states of having cloud optimized formats. And some don't even have a really good standardized format. With SAR, what's the file type for complex amplitude and phase? I'm sure there's that exists, but I don't think it's nearly as far as along as some of the other data types. So we need to get everything into a format that is solid and cloud optimized. And so some recent work out of Howard Butler's group to do the cloud optimized point cloud is really awesome and exciting and puts us along this trajectory where the more things that we can get into a format like take Cog as a leading example, a format that works with existing tooling, but also allows for cloud optimized reading. I think it's really, really important work. And so I just want to highlight this paper that was just put out very recently, uses open vigorous data analysis of the current state. And it sort of highlights the point of why cloud optimized. Well, given the growing amount of data volumes, cloud-based services seem the only realistic way forward for data providers and users. So that's that, but there's another section that talks about the survey responses and who downloads data and it's everybody. I mean, we're still downloading data, which is not the problem of the user. It means that it's not easy enough. It's not the quickest way to access data yet. I download data, like everybody does it. And we need to be moving to a future that working with the data in the cloud is just as easy. And we need to make that choice because it was the easier choice. And then so just because data is available, there's a file somewhere on the cloud, doesn't mean that it's accessible. And so I think there's been a leave some bounds towards this, but it still remains a challenge to find only the data you need across all the different data types. And so standards like the Space and Temporal Asset Catalog and the suite of API standards from OTC help enable an ecosystem of tooling to be able to speak the same language and give greater access to these data types. And I think that there's a lot of work to do to not only continue fleshing out those specs, but also building out those tools. So if there's no searching for what you need, it's clear how to access all these different data types. So I'm going to end with another sort of quote that I carry with me. And it was January Macomba, a minister of state of Tanzania who in the 2018 Darsalam keynote said very bluntly, if geospatial tools and data do not serve humanity, then they are simply toys. And I take that to heart because there's a lot of really cool things we're doing in the geospatial community, but we need to be connecting it back to the impact that it's having. And I think finding a way, even if it's a small way of connecting your work back to setting the future up for success in dealing with the climate crisis is really important work that does serve humanity. And I know that a lot of us know that and we're trying. And I just want to recognize that and thank you for your work towards that and encourage you to continue. And a lot of people who are doing really awesome work towards that are speaking in our track today. So I encourage you to stick around. And I know I'll be learning a lot from the lineup of amazing speakers. But yeah, thanks for your time. I'm going to switch back to checking comments now. Okay. I have to get the heck out of this real quick. Move that. Thanks. Yeah, as Steven mentioned in the chat, there is an open call for grants that in collaboration with Geo. There's a new one that specifically around how to utilize the NICV data from Planet. And actually, Tara Shea will be speaking about that program later. So I'm really excited to hear her describe that data set and looking forward to collaborating with the participants of that program.
 Let's do that one.  I won't be able to see questions while I'm presenting, but I'll get to them after the  talk.  My name is Robin Manuel.  I'm a geospatial architect for Microsoft on the environmental sustainability team in  AI for Earth.  I want to talk to you today about Phosphor G and the climate crisis.  First off, I want to talk a little bit about Microsoft AI for Earth and why we're the diamond  sponsor of Phosphor G this year.  I know if I was an attendee a couple years back, I might be like, oh, Microsoft, that's  an interesting choice.  Maybe have a little bit of some thoughts about how Microsoft interacted with open source  back in the first decade, in the 21st century.  Under the leadership of Satin and Dala, Microsoft owns GitHub and is a big prominent open source  software.  But specifically around Phosphor G, I'll answer that question by going into our sustainability  work.  Microsoft is committed to using its technology, its cloud, to build a more sustainable future.  Those commitments are specific and there are four specific areas.  In 2020, we announced that we were committed to being carbon negative by 2030, and not just  that, by 2050 to have removed all the carbon it's ever emitted since its founding in 1975.  Committed to being water positive by 2030, and that means that Microsoft will replenish  more water than it consumes on a global basis.  Committing to zero waste.  Our goal is to achieve zero waste for Microsoft's direct operations, products, and packaging  by 2030.  And also to protect our ecosystems.  Committing to protecting more land than we used by 2025.  And also as part of this, building and deploying what we're calling a planetary computer.  And that's what I work on.  I'm an engineer on the team building out the services around our open data and analytics.  And all of that is built on Phosphor G. It's very specifically built on an open source  and really stands on the shoulders of the giants of this community.  So really excited to be able to sponsor this conference and to give our support.  And really happy that I can be speaking with you today.  But I'm not going to be talking about the planetary computer today.  If you're interested, go ahead and see my talk tomorrow where I'll be going over some  of the technical details of how we're utilizing open source software and the architecture of  planetary computer.  What I want to talk to you today about is the climate crisis.  So I am very privileged to be working with a number of very smart scientists that are  really close to the science of what's going on with the warming climate.  And so I wanted to just bring some of the lessons that I have learned, you know, learning  from them to this conference.  And specifically around some of the results that you can take away from the IPCC report  recently in August.  The first section of AR6 was released.  Some of the misconceptions will be released over the coming year.  But this one focused specifically on the physical science basis.  And I'll just, you know, ask Dricks like, I'm not an environmental scientist.  So this is some of my interpretations of what very smart people have told me.  So if I'm incorrect, please correct me in the comments.  Go ahead and yell at me.  So one of the things, the sort of key takeaways is that, you know, 1.5 degrees Celsius above  pre-industrial average could be reached within a decade.  And it's more likely than not to be breached even in the scenario where we get to net zero  by 2050.  There's an aggressive cutting of carbon as well as, you know, removing carbon from the  air more more likely than not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius.  And that number is sort of important because in 2015 during COP 21, there was the Paris  Agreement that was entered into force in 2016.  And that had a goal of, you know, keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius,  but preferably below 1.5 degrees Celsius.  And it looks like we've already, you know, five years later sort of missed that mark.  And then so this isn't part of the IPCC report, but other research, you know, current policies  have us missing that by a wide margin where we're on track to reach three degrees Celsius  of warming by 2,100.  And so it's important to note that the warming, the number that signifies the sort of mean  warming of the planet does not mean that like every location will just have that warming,  right?  It's generally larger over land than in oceans.  So based on a location, the warming that's experienced will be significantly different.  And you can see in the north, it seems like the warming that would be experienced is a  lot greater.  And so another thing that was kind of a key takeaway from the IPCC report is that the  tipping points are presented with greater confidence and concern.  So abrupt potentially catastrophic and irrevisible changes are presented with more specificity  and confidence than in previous reports.  One example of this, and there's some other research talking about early warning signs  around this overturning circulation.  And yeah, these things could potentially collapse, disrupting rain.  The farmers relying to grow food in Africa and South America making winter's more extreme  in Europe and further destabilizing the Greenland ice sheet and the Amazon rainforest.  Other examples of tipping points highlighted in the report include rapid melting of the  Antarctic ice sheet, permafrost collapse, and permanent forest loss.  And while the report considered these events with a low likelihood of happening this century,  it also reports with a high confidence that they can't be ruled out.  One sort of pretty stark takeaway that hit me was that we've likely already hit 1.5 in  warming, but we're also emitting aerosols into the air that have a cooling effect.  So we're only experiencing, we're only observing 1.1 degrees Celsius that warming because of  the aerosol emissions.  And it's important to note that greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere longer than aerosols.  So if we were to stop emitting both greenhouse gases and aerosols tomorrow, the aerosols  would disappear faster than the greenhouse gases.  And so in effect, we would experience warming due to that removal aerosols in the air.  But it's not all doom and gloom, there's indication that rapid aggressive emission  cuts coupled with carbon dioxide removal, a lot of the stuff that Microsoft is working  on being a purchaser in.  There was just a nature article published around our processes for trying to really  invest in the carbon removal market and do large purchases of carbon removal.  But that type of work could limit warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, even if we would  dip above or breach 1.5 at some point and then dip down to lower the last part of the  century.  But I think it's important to talk about it not necessarily as climate change that's  happening in the future.  This is a climate crisis that's happening right now.  One of the things that the IPCC report has been able to take advantage of is the science  that's gotten better at attributing weather events, climate events to human-induced climate  change.  And so they're able to do that for things happening right now.  And we can see that the number of hot extreme events has increased already with high confidence.  The number of observed change and heavy participation has changed and then also agricultural and  ecological droughts.  So this is something that's already here.  And so I just want to take a moment to say the magnitude of this problem can be super  overwhelming.  I know that I feel very overwhelmed by it often.  And especially with everything that's going on with the pandemic and just the world, it's  kind of easy to get kind of discouraged about the outlook.  But I want to say that we in the foster G community are positioned to make a difference.  I really believe that geospatial data is a critical, irreplaceable asset in the work,  not just the work that's going on now, but in all of the future challenges presented  by the climate crisis.  It will be important.  There's the saying that you can't manage what you can't measure and all of the measurements  at a planetary scale deal with location and time.  And the sensors that we have up in space looking down on our planet are collecting data that's  irreplaceable.  Like there's nothing else that can kind of give those measurements.  So it's really important data in dealing with this crisis.  We've made leaps and strides in being able to utilize that data, but I think we have  a really long way to go.  This isn't sort of a new idea, right?  In 2018, keynote Chris Holmes at Foster GNA had a great talk called Towards a Quarieable  Earth.  And if you haven't seen it, I recommend going.  It's still very relevant.  And one of the key points of this where he lays out sort of a blueprint of how we go  from data to something where you can query anything on the planet is this last part,  which is that the GIS and remote sensing is abstracted away.  And so I think this is a really important point that we're still very far from, right?  Be as geospatial experts, as the people using and building Foster G, open source geospatial  software, are the ones responsible for handling that complexity, the complexity of the data  and the complexity of the processes that are inherently geospatial.  And unless we're delivering something that abstracts away all that technical complexity,  we're not quite there yet.  And I really believe that the work we do now to make this data and technology easier, faster,  more efficient, won't just help with the current challenges, but also set the future up for  success.  And I think that's really important to keep top of mind because while the climate crisis  is here and we're already feeling the effects, the people who will be really dealing with  it might be several decades out.  And so what can we be doing now that sets those people up for success?  And hopefully they're not still scratching their heads about how to find and manipulate  geospatial data.  That'll be a solved problem.  So yeah, a question would be like, what do we build now that would be most useful in  the future?  We're very far away and who knows what will happen?  Who knows what the needs will be?  So I think this is, nope, there's not a real answer to this.  But what we can do is look at sort of what are the lasting technologies that have been  around in previous decades that are still useful today.  And I'll just highlight GDAL.  The initial release was in June 2000 and so two decades later, it's used everywhere.  It's still just so widely used.  It solves a problem that is a problem today just like it was a problem in 2000.  And so I was having a conversation with Frank Warmerdam, the founder of GDAL, several years  back.  And I asked him, why did you start GDAL?  And he said in a paraphrasing, he was like, well, I looked for the problem that nobody  wanted to work on that everybody had.  And everybody was having issues with data formats and reading and data in a consistent  way.  And it was hard work and it was boring work.  It wasn't the glamorous work that was going on.  But I decided to take that on and solve that problem.  And then the community that's built around GDAL continues that to this day, solving those  sort of low level IO problems that everybody has.  If we didn't have GDAL, it would be a lot harder.  But we can solve it sort of in a general way that lets people concentrate on the work that  they're getting to.  And then so I think that's a huge lesson that I've carried forward.  And I hope maybe you can take some inspiration from as well to build lasting solutions, focusing  on those hard, fundamental, and potentially boring problems that are keeping everyone  from doing more interesting work and shouldering that.  And so I think that's what we need to be doing, not necessarily that it's boring work, but  there's important foundational work that we need to be doing.  And I like to think about it in these four areas where focusing on the data that's available,  how do we get those data into the proper formats to be cloud optimized and ready for use, the  access, how are people accessing that data, how are people searching for the data that  they need?  Analytics.  There's a wide variety of analytics that you'd want to apply to this data once you find the  data that you're interested in, including combining different data sets and how easy  is that to do.  And then finally, applications because the insights derived from analytics from accessing  the data don't mean much unless they're applied to impact specific decisions or optimize certain  processes or ultimately manage Earth's natural systems.  So I'm just going to talk about data and access today because of time.  But so yeah, there's a wide range of types.  There's optical imagery, which I think we've got a pretty good handle on.  I think Landsat being put up as a cloud optimized geotest was a huge leg up in that effort to  make raster data, imagery data really accessible and easy to use.  But there's other types, synthetic aperture radar, hyperspectral imagery, point cloud.  And all these types are in various states of having cloud optimized formats.  And some don't even have a really good standardized format.  With SAR, what's the file type for complex amplitude and phase?  I'm sure there's that exists, but I don't think it's nearly as far as along as some  of the other data types.  So we need to get everything into a format that is solid and cloud optimized.  And so some recent work out of Howard Butler's group to do the cloud optimized point cloud  is really awesome and exciting and puts us along this trajectory where the more things  that we can get into a format like take Cog as a leading example, a format that works with  existing tooling, but also allows for cloud optimized reading.  I think it's really, really important work.  And so I just want to highlight this paper that was just put out very recently, uses  open vigorous data analysis of the current state.  And it sort of highlights the point of why cloud optimized.  Well, given the growing amount of data volumes, cloud-based services seem the only realistic  way forward for data providers and users.  So that's that, but there's another section that talks about the survey responses and  who downloads data and it's everybody.  I mean, we're still downloading data, which is not the problem of the user.  It means that it's not easy enough.  It's not the quickest way to access data yet.  I download data, like everybody does it.  And we need to be moving to a future that working with the data in the cloud is just  as easy.  And we need to make that choice because it was the easier choice.  And then so just because data is available, there's a file somewhere on the cloud, doesn't  mean that it's accessible.  And so I think there's been a leave some bounds towards this, but it still remains a challenge  to find only the data you need across all the different data types.  And so standards like the Space and Temporal Asset Catalog and the suite of API standards  from OTC help enable an ecosystem of tooling to be able to speak the same language and  give greater access to these data types.  And I think that there's a lot of work to do to not only continue fleshing out those  specs, but also building out those tools.  So if there's no searching for what you need, it's clear how to access all these different  data types.  So I'm going to end with another sort of quote that I carry with me.  And it was January Macomba, a minister of state of Tanzania who in the 2018 Darsalam  keynote said very bluntly, if geospatial tools and data do not serve humanity, then  they are simply toys.  And I take that to heart because there's a lot of really cool things we're doing in  the geospatial community, but we need to be connecting it back to the impact that it's  having.  And I think finding a way, even if it's a small way of connecting your work back to setting  the future up for success in dealing with the climate crisis is really important work  that does serve humanity.  And I know that a lot of us know that and we're trying.  And I just want to recognize that and thank you for your work towards that and encourage  you to continue.  And a lot of people who are doing really awesome work towards that are speaking in our track  today.  So I encourage you to stick around.  And I know I'll be learning a lot from the lineup of amazing speakers.  But yeah, thanks for your time.  I'm going to switch back to checking comments now.  Okay.  I have to get the heck out of this real quick.  Move that.  Thanks.  Yeah, as Steven mentioned in the chat, there is an open call for grants that in collaboration  with Geo.  There's a new one that specifically around how to utilize the NICV data from Planet.  And actually, Tara Shea will be speaking about that program later.  So I'm really excited to hear her describe that data set and looking forward to collaborating  with the participants of that program.
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Let's do that one. I won't be able to see questions while I'm presenting, but I'll get to them after the talk. My name is Robin Manuel. I'm a geospatial architect for Microsoft on the environmental sustainability team in AI for Earth. I want to talk to you today about Phosphor G and the climate crisis. First off, I want to talk a little bit about Microsoft AI for Earth and why we're the diamond sponsor of Phosphor G this year. I know if I was an attendee a couple years back, I might be like, oh, Microsoft, that's an interesting choice. Maybe have a little bit of some thoughts about how Microsoft interacted with open source back in the first decade, in the 21st century. Under the leadership of Satin and Dala, Microsoft owns GitHub and is a big prominent open source software. But specifically around Phosphor G, I'll answer that question by going into our sustainability work. Microsoft is committed to using its technology, its cloud, to build a more sustainable future. Those commitments are specific and there are four specific areas. In 2020, we announced that we were committed to being carbon negative by 2030, and not just that, by 2050 to have removed all the carbon it's ever emitted since its founding in 1975. Committed to being water positive by 2030, and that means that Microsoft will replenish more water than it consumes on a global basis. Committing to zero waste. Our goal is to achieve zero waste for Microsoft's direct operations, products, and packaging by 2030. And also to protect our ecosystems. Committing to protecting more land than we used by 2025. And also as part of this, building and deploying what we're calling a planetary computer. And that's what I work on. I'm an engineer on the team building out the services around our open data and analytics. And all of that is built on Phosphor G. It's very specifically built on an open source and really stands on the shoulders of the giants of this community. So really excited to be able to sponsor this conference and to give our support. And really happy that I can be speaking with you today. But I'm not going to be talking about the planetary computer today. If you're interested, go ahead and see my talk tomorrow where I'll be going over some of the technical details of how we're utilizing open source software and the architecture of planetary computer. What I want to talk to you today about is the climate crisis. So I am very privileged to be working with a number of very smart scientists that are really close to the science of what's going on with the warming climate. And so I wanted to just bring some of the lessons that I have learned, you know, learning from them to this conference. And specifically around some of the results that you can take away from the IPCC report recently in August. The first section of AR6 was released. Some of the misconceptions will be released over the coming year. But this one focused specifically on the physical science basis. And I'll just, you know, ask Dricks like, I'm not an environmental scientist. So this is some of my interpretations of what very smart people have told me. So if I'm incorrect, please correct me in the comments. Go ahead and yell at me. So one of the things, the sort of key takeaways is that, you know, 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial average could be reached within a decade. And it's more likely than not to be breached even in the scenario where we get to net zero by 2050. There's an aggressive cutting of carbon as well as, you know, removing carbon from the air more more likely than not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that number is sort of important because in 2015 during COP 21, there was the Paris Agreement that was entered into force in 2016. And that had a goal of, you know, keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, but preferably below 1.5 degrees Celsius. And it looks like we've already, you know, five years later sort of missed that mark. And then so this isn't part of the IPCC report, but other research, you know, current policies have us missing that by a wide margin where we're on track to reach three degrees Celsius of warming by 2,100. And so it's important to note that the warming, the number that signifies the sort of mean warming of the planet does not mean that like every location will just have that warming, right? It's generally larger over land than in oceans. So based on a location, the warming that's experienced will be significantly different. And you can see in the north, it seems like the warming that would be experienced is a lot greater. And so another thing that was kind of a key takeaway from the IPCC report is that the tipping points are presented with greater confidence and concern. So abrupt potentially catastrophic and irrevisible changes are presented with more specificity and confidence than in previous reports. One example of this, and there's some other research talking about early warning signs around this overturning circulation. And yeah, these things could potentially collapse, disrupting rain. The farmers relying to grow food in Africa and South America making winter's more extreme in Europe and further destabilizing the Greenland ice sheet and the Amazon rainforest. Other examples of tipping points highlighted in the report include rapid melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, permafrost collapse, and permanent forest loss. And while the report considered these events with a low likelihood of happening this century, it also reports with a high confidence that they can't be ruled out. One sort of pretty stark takeaway that hit me was that we've likely already hit 1.5 in warming, but we're also emitting aerosols into the air that have a cooling effect. So we're only experiencing, we're only observing 1.1 degrees Celsius that warming because of the aerosol emissions. And it's important to note that greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere longer than aerosols. So if we were to stop emitting both greenhouse gases and aerosols tomorrow, the aerosols would disappear faster than the greenhouse gases. And so in effect, we would experience warming due to that removal aerosols in the air. But it's not all doom and gloom, there's indication that rapid aggressive emission cuts coupled with carbon dioxide removal, a lot of the stuff that Microsoft is working on being a purchaser in. There was just a nature article published around our processes for trying to really invest in the carbon removal market and do large purchases of carbon removal. But that type of work could limit warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, even if we would dip above or breach 1.5 at some point and then dip down to lower the last part of the century. But I think it's important to talk about it not necessarily as climate change that's happening in the future. This is a climate crisis that's happening right now. One of the things that the IPCC report has been able to take advantage of is the science that's gotten better at attributing weather events, climate events to human-induced climate change. And so they're able to do that for things happening right now. And we can see that the number of hot extreme events has increased already with high confidence. The number of observed change and heavy participation has changed and then also agricultural and ecological droughts. So this is something that's already here. And so I just want to take a moment to say the magnitude of this problem can be super overwhelming. I know that I feel very overwhelmed by it often. And especially with everything that's going on with the pandemic and just the world, it's kind of easy to get kind of discouraged about the outlook. But I want to say that we in the foster G community are positioned to make a difference. I really believe that geospatial data is a critical, irreplaceable asset in the work, not just the work that's going on now, but in all of the future challenges presented by the climate crisis. It will be important. There's the saying that you can't manage what you can't measure and all of the measurements at a planetary scale deal with location and time. And the sensors that we have up in space looking down on our planet are collecting data that's irreplaceable. Like there's nothing else that can kind of give those measurements. So it's really important data in dealing with this crisis. We've made leaps and strides in being able to utilize that data, but I think we have a really long way to go. This isn't sort of a new idea, right? In 2018, keynote Chris Holmes at Foster GNA had a great talk called Towards a Quarieable Earth. And if you haven't seen it, I recommend going. It's still very relevant. And one of the key points of this where he lays out sort of a blueprint of how we go from data to something where you can query anything on the planet is this last part, which is that the GIS and remote sensing is abstracted away. And so I think this is a really important point that we're still very far from, right? Be as geospatial experts, as the people using and building Foster G, open source geospatial software, are the ones responsible for handling that complexity, the complexity of the data and the complexity of the processes that are inherently geospatial. And unless we're delivering something that abstracts away all that technical complexity, we're not quite there yet. And I really believe that the work we do now to make this data and technology easier, faster, more efficient, won't just help with the current challenges, but also set the future up for success. And I think that's really important to keep top of mind because while the climate crisis is here and we're already feeling the effects, the people who will be really dealing with it might be several decades out. And so what can we be doing now that sets those people up for success? And hopefully they're not still scratching their heads about how to find and manipulate geospatial data. That'll be a solved problem. So yeah, a question would be like, what do we build now that would be most useful in the future? We're very far away and who knows what will happen? Who knows what the needs will be? So I think this is, nope, there's not a real answer to this. But what we can do is look at sort of what are the lasting technologies that have been around in previous decades that are still useful today. And I'll just highlight GDAL. The initial release was in June 2000 and so two decades later, it's used everywhere. It's still just so widely used. It solves a problem that is a problem today just like it was a problem in 2000. And so I was having a conversation with Frank Warmerdam, the founder of GDAL, several years back. And I asked him, why did you start GDAL? And he said in a paraphrasing, he was like, well, I looked for the problem that nobody wanted to work on that everybody had. And everybody was having issues with data formats and reading and data in a consistent way. And it was hard work and it was boring work. It wasn't the glamorous work that was going on. But I decided to take that on and solve that problem. And then the community that's built around GDAL continues that to this day, solving those sort of low level IO problems that everybody has. If we didn't have GDAL, it would be a lot harder. But we can solve it sort of in a general way that lets people concentrate on the work that they're getting to. And then so I think that's a huge lesson that I've carried forward. And I hope maybe you can take some inspiration from as well to build lasting solutions, focusing on those hard, fundamental, and potentially boring problems that are keeping everyone from doing more interesting work and shouldering that. And so I think that's what we need to be doing, not necessarily that it's boring work, but there's important foundational work that we need to be doing. And I like to think about it in these four areas where focusing on the data that's available, how do we get those data into the proper formats to be cloud optimized and ready for use, the access, how are people accessing that data, how are people searching for the data that they need? Analytics. There's a wide variety of analytics that you'd want to apply to this data once you find the data that you're interested in, including combining different data sets and how easy is that to do. And then finally, applications because the insights derived from analytics from accessing the data don't mean much unless they're applied to impact specific decisions or optimize certain processes or ultimately manage Earth's natural systems. So I'm just going to talk about data and access today because of time. But so yeah, there's a wide range of types. There's optical imagery, which I think we've got a pretty good handle on. I think Landsat being put up as a cloud optimized geotest was a huge leg up in that effort to make raster data, imagery data really accessible and easy to use. But there's other types, synthetic aperture radar, hyperspectral imagery, point cloud. And all these types are in various states of having cloud optimized formats. And some don't even have a really good standardized format. With SAR, what's the file type for complex amplitude and phase? I'm sure there's that exists, but I don't think it's nearly as far as along as some of the other data types. So we need to get everything into a format that is solid and cloud optimized. And so some recent work out of Howard Butler's group to do the cloud optimized point cloud is really awesome and exciting and puts us along this trajectory where the more things that we can get into a format like take Cog as a leading example, a format that works with existing tooling, but also allows for cloud optimized reading. I think it's really, really important work. And so I just want to highlight this paper that was just put out very recently, uses open vigorous data analysis of the current state. And it sort of highlights the point of why cloud optimized. Well, given the growing amount of data volumes, cloud-based services seem the only realistic way forward for data providers and users. So that's that, but there's another section that talks about the survey responses and who downloads data and it's everybody. I mean, we're still downloading data, which is not the problem of the user. It means that it's not easy enough. It's not the quickest way to access data yet. I download data, like everybody does it. And we need to be moving to a future that working with the data in the cloud is just as easy. And we need to make that choice because it was the easier choice. And then so just because data is available, there's a file somewhere on the cloud, doesn't mean that it's accessible. And so I think there's been a leave some bounds towards this, but it still remains a challenge to find only the data you need across all the different data types. And so standards like the Space and Temporal Asset Catalog and the suite of API standards from OTC help enable an ecosystem of tooling to be able to speak the same language and give greater access to these data types. And I think that there's a lot of work to do to not only continue fleshing out those specs, but also building out those tools. So if there's no searching for what you need, it's clear how to access all these different data types. So I'm going to end with another sort of quote that I carry with me. And it was January Macomba, a minister of state of Tanzania who in the 2018 Darsalam keynote said very bluntly, if geospatial tools and data do not serve humanity, then they are simply toys. And I take that to heart because there's a lot of really cool things we're doing in the geospatial community, but we need to be connecting it back to the impact that it's having. And I think finding a way, even if it's a small way of connecting your work back to setting the future up for success in dealing with the climate crisis is really important work that does serve humanity. And I know that a lot of us know that and we're trying. And I just want to recognize that and thank you for your work towards that and encourage you to continue. And a lot of people who are doing really awesome work towards that are speaking in our track today. So I encourage you to stick around. And I know I'll be learning a lot from the lineup of amazing speakers. But yeah, thanks for your time. I'm going to switch back to checking comments now. Okay. I have to get the heck out of this real quick. Move that. Thanks. Yeah, as Steven mentioned in the chat, there is an open call for grants that in collaboration with Geo. There's a new one that specifically around how to utilize the NICV data from Planet. And actually, Tara Shea will be speaking about that program later. So I'm really excited to hear her describe that data set and looking forward to collaborating with the participants of that program.
Microsoft is committed to using its technology, its cloud, to build a more sustainable future. Those commitments are specific and there are four basis. Committing to zero waste. Our goal is to achieve zero waste for Microsoft's direct also to protect our ecosystems. Committing to going on with the warming climate. And so I be released over the coming year. But this one above pre-industrial average could be reached also reports with a high confidence that they century. But I think it's important to talk about human-induced climate change. And so they're able increased already with high confidence. The geospatial data is a critical, irreplaceable on now, but in all of the future challenges relevant. And one of the key points of this where the planet is this last part, which is that the building Foster G, open source geospatial that complexity, the complexity of the data and will happen? Who knows what the needs will be? So what are the lasting technologies that have been data in a consistent way. And it was hard work people searching for the data that they need? ultimately manage Earth's natural systems. So I'm tools and data do not serve humanity, then they in the geospatial community, but we need to be