Earth Map reinforces FAO’s Mano de la Mano geospatial platform and enables all people with basic Internet access to use critical information on agriculture, environment and climate.
Thanks to the new tool developed by Google and FAO, everyone will be able to access, at any time and from anywhere, multidimensional maps and statistics on the main environmental and climate trends.
Earth Map is an innovative and free, web-based tool that, in just a few clicks, provides objective, efficient, fast and affordable analytical insights from satellites and from FAO’s extensive collection of data of interest to agriculture.
In addition, it is designed to reinforce and synergistically integrate the FAO Hand in Hand Initiative unified geospatial platform, a more comprehensive tool that enables Members, their partners and donors to seek out and implement highly targeted rural development initiatives. with different objectives, from adaptation to climate change and mitigation of its effects to socio-economic resilience.
FAO
Earth Map is the continuation of the successful Collect Earth platform, developed in collaboration with Google as part of FAO’s OpenForis toolkit, which has already proven useful in forest assessments, land cover assessments, and formulation and implementation of projects.
«I am convinced that we will succeed in transforming our food systems to feed the world thanks to digital agriculture,» said QU Dongyu, FAO Director General. «We have to make digital technologies accessible to everyone.»
Earth Map provides multitemporal, quasi-real-time satellite imagery and geospatial datasets on which the Google Earth Engine is based and complements them with more analytical capabilities on a planetary scale to enable detection, quantification and tracking of changes and trends in the land surface.
To use these functions, users do not need to master sophisticated coding techniques, which mitigates bottlenecks related to the technical capacities of developing countries and, ultimately, simplifies the contribution and access of small producers to knowledge critical as the sustenance of their livelihoods.
The Asociation
Google and FAO began their partnership in 2015 with the signing of an agreement in parallel to the Paris Agreement. Initially, work focused on forest cover and acreage mapping techniques, and is now rapidly expanding to biodiversity conservation, pest control, and water resources management, among other areas. .
«Earth Map products are tailored to user needs and can be used as ‘dashboards’ and as maps,» says Moore.
More than 50 countries have benefited from the tools of FAO and Google, and the Organization already uses this technology to prepare and supervise different projects, such as in Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uzbekistan, and to help Members apply for grants from different entities, such as the Green Climate Fund and the World Bank.
Relying on funding from the German Federal Ministry for Environment, Nuclear Safety and Nature Preservation’s International Climate Initiative, Earth Map offers a wide range of data, from temperature to rainfall, population, vegetation, evapotranspiration, elevation and floor.
Thanks to the real-time capabilities and constant updating of the tool, this data is especially useful for collaborators at Mano de la Mano, a country-led, evidence-based FAO initiative that aims to accelerate transformation agriculture and sustainable rural development.
The new tool also highlights how FAO is converting its role as a data owner to a custodial distribution role in order to maximize its beneficial use.
«For this reason, big data is macro, and for this reason, alliances will also take on an increasing role in the path towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals,» said Maximo Torero, FAO Chief Economist.
Using Earth Map
The potential of the tool was recently highlighted when, with a few clicks, program managers participating in the presentation of a Green Climate Fund project in Kyrgyzstan were able to see, by district, the large variations in the patterns of precipitation relative to the broader average measurements, which allowed refining the project design.
«In this case, what’s groundbreaking is that Earth Map brings the unmatched power of Google Earth Engine to anyone’s fingertips in just seconds, so that anyone with basic Internet access will be able to analyze big data, even if they don’t have it. coding or remote sensing experience, «says Danilo Mollicone, Senior Technical Officer for the FAO team working on the new tools and Collect Earth.
