With the progressive development of new inventions in industries and sectors, the abundance of greenhouse gas emissions has risen rapidly over several years, causing erratic climate change. As a result, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, storms, and droughts are getting more intense and frequent. Water scarcity in already water-stressed regions is exacerbating, as well as the increasing risk of one million species becoming extinct within the next few years. Furthermore, since the 1980s, each decade has been warmer than the previous one, resulting in higher mortality rates, decreased production, and infrastructure damage. Thus, governments, communities, businesses, and investors are determining ways of resolving the problem and transitioning toward a more sustainable future.
According to the World Economic Forum, more than 160 satellites are currently measuring different global warming indicators, with more than half of the essential climate variables only measurable from space. Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite is one of those satellites that contribute to monitoring gas emissions, which collects information from other sources and tracks refineries along with animal farms’ atmospheric methane emissions. In that manner, the oil and gas companies will be able to observe their environmental effect, be transparent about their petroleum and natural gas emissions, and convey information to investors and customers through this method.
Climate change is already affecting water access and causing droughts and floods across the world. Consequently, to ameliorate water management the OpenET platform was created, which supplies farmers, water managers, and all forestry experts with evapotranspiration data gathered by NASA over 20 years. Evapotranspiration is a standard measure of the quantity of water required by a given agricultural crop. This way, demand, and supply can be regulated, resulting in enormous savings.
Since 1995, RADARSAT satellites have kept an eye on the health of ecosystems by mapping and tracking changes. Beyond its primary mission, RADARSAT collects data on changes in forests, tundra, wetlands, coasts, and other protected areas. It serves both commercial and scientific customers in sectors such as disaster management, interferometry, agriculture, mapping, hydrology, forestry, oceanography, ice research, and coastal monitoring, simultaneously helping to achieve SDG Number 13: Monitoring and Combating Climate Change.
To conclude, with the progression of climate change, various issues such as water shortage, high temperatures, weather anomalies, and loss of wildlife are currently affecting everything around the world. Therefore, tackling the predicament and achieving one of the sustainable development goals by using space-based technologies is one of the best decisions.