Geospatial data for sustainable development and climate solutions

Today it’s Finance Day at the COP26.
Mobilising finance for Climate Action is vital to limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees.

Did you know Airbus, with our collaborators Property Risk Inspection, have been working to support lenders in their response to the CBES?
By providing flood and subsidence risk data adjusted under different future climate scenarios, we can help banks identify the exposure of their portfolio to climate related risk.

Want to find out more about how we are helping the finance and insurance sector in the fight against climate change?

It’s Energy Day at the COP26 today. At Airbus, our Energy team regularly explores different climate change use cases in which we can utilise our Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Our Energy team have recently developed a prototype image analysis algorithm that counts and characterises solar panels to effectively monitor the construction and evolution of solar farms. Each panel is delineated as a polygon to facilitate the characterisation of panel area, length, and orientation. This algorithm was tested and developed on Airbus 50cm Pléiades imagery and 1.5m SPOT imagery at several solar farms globally.

To help us discover more climate change use cases for our AI:

Hurricane Ida made landfall near Port Fourchon, Louisiana, on the morning of 29th August 2021. Through our partnership with @Ecopia AI, Airbus was able to rapidly assess the impacts of Hurricane Ida and provide critical post-catastrophe insights for damage assessment. By leveraging pre-event and post-cat satellite imagery from Airbus, combined with Ecopia's advanced artificial intelligence extraction capabilities, we were able to rapidly deliver a set of high-resolution digital maps to quickly assess and respond. To conduct this effort, Airbus first captured new high-resolution 50cm resolution Pléiades satellite imagery of the area and pulled pre-hurricane imagery from its high-resolution imagery archive. Ecopia AI then leveraged the pre-hurricane imagery as an input into its proprietary artificial intelligence-based systems to rapidly generate highly accurate vector maps of the area. Importantly, damage was classed into two classes: damaged and destroyed. As natural disasters, including hurricanes, tornados, droughts, and floods, become more frequent, the ability to evaluate potential impacts prior to an event will be increasingly important.

Governments and insurers need an up-to-date, accurate picture of how risk to infrastructure, homes and buildings are evolving to improve early warning systems, flood defences, and build resilient infrastructure, to respond faster and more effectively to natural disasters when they occur. With the arrival of Airbus Pléiades Neo 30cm resolution satellite imagery, Airbus and Ecopia AI will be able to provide an even more precise view of conditions on the ground and add more granular context to decision-making. To learn more about our high-accuracy mapping solution, visit this page.

The Indian Government selects Micronet Solutions - Airbus' Reseller in India to Provide Radar Imagery for Rice Mapping Project.

As a largely rural-based economy, timely information about how crops are performing is critical to India’s farming community. Essentially, government institutions need to know about crop acreage and yield early in the season in order to plan for paddy crop procurement. Due to monsoons, there is little optical imagery coverage available in the region during the sowing season. Furthermore, traditional on the ground methods for collecting this data are slow as crop acreage statistics are published at a date late in the growing season (only once the paddy crop is standing and a ground-based survey has been conducted). This lack of timely data results in delays in the government procurement process, with the livelihoods of vulnerable small-scale farmers impacted the hardest.

To find a viable alternative, the Indian Government has turned to dual polarisation Radar Constellation imagery from Airbus Intelligence to map paddy acreage and yield during the next monsoon season. This radar imagery will provide a reliable, weather-independent data source for plot wise identification of paddy crops, but also to obtain a record of any disasters that may take place during the season, such as flooding. Importantly, this non-biased data will enable damage assessment to be carried out in a timely manner so the farmers can be compensated for crop losses immediately.