Just after Time magazine announced its Person of the Year, the National Research Council (NRC) released |            its seminal report for the next decade of the nation’s Earth science activities, “Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond.”

 

Time applauded those who by means of the Internet have “changed the way we see ourselves and the world we live in, forever.” The magazine pointed largely to content providers such as the YouTubers and Wikipedians.

 

We hope soon to be able to salute another rich source of information in changing the way we see ourselves and our world — the unparalleled visualization of Earth and human interaction with it, provided uniquely by observations from space.

 

Steps toward this goal are a key recommendation of the NRC study. It calls for strong actions to obtain economic and other benefits of Earth science, stating “a central theme of this report is that space-based observation of the planet must address important societal needs. … Observations without analysis, interpretation, and application are sterile …” The report dedicates a full chapter to the topic of applications and service to society, placing it on a par with other chapters addressing specific missions. That chapter describes opportunities of applications and urges steps to exploit them. In turn, each mission proposed in the survey is identified with environmental, public health, natural resource management, climate and weather, and other societal concerns to which data and information may be able to contribute.

 

To be sure, some research and applications efforts to date — such as those sponsored by NASA’s Earth science division — have resulted in demonstrating an array of benefits. Scant funding has restricted these largely to demonstration projects, however, and they are both few and limited to proof of concept.

 

The survey points out that “unless there is sustained institutional support for interactions between the scientific producers and the applications users of information, there is a risk that even successful examples of Earth science applications become ‘one-off’ experiments that are not repeated over time.”

 

More projects across a host of applications areas are urgently needed. For example, NASA has identified 12 areas of national importance, ranging from carbon management to homeland security and public health, in which Earth observations can play essential roles. In addition, the Group on Earth Observations, an international activity stimulated by U.S. government interest in the applied use of Earth observations, has identified nine areas of wide-ranging, international benefit.

 

Yet there remain many examples of untapped applications. A prominent local example for those who live in the Washington area is the clean-up of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States, which has a watershed encompassing the District of Columbia and all or part of six states. One of the biggest problems in managing this natural resource is the lack of public understanding of the effects of everyday activities on the watershed.

 

We now have the remotely sensed data, the science and the electronic tools to enable citizens in, say, Pennsylvania to see the effect of their lawn fertilizers as a source of nonpoint runoff. Effectively communicating the impacts of people’s behavior has been one of the biggest challenges of bay restoration and protection. The incredibly powerful ability to offer visualization of the watershed and the impacts of daily activities using a blend of Earth science, 3-D imagery and dynamic updating has the potential to change our lives and the world around us.

 

Another example is the use of space-derived Earth observations to improve farmers’ understanding of the effect of agricultural practices in rural India on soil quality and water supplies. A recent World Bank-sponsored project in the state of Karnataka used Earth observations to monitor watersheds and was described by the World Bank as “amazing,” “cutting edge,” and having the potential to be “best practice.” Even more important, residents of the village agreed that they place more trust in satellite data than in data gathered in situ. But this and dozens of similar efforts have represented one-time experiments rather than routine use of space-based information for decision making.

 

A third example derives from the best seller, Environment and Statecraft, by Johns Hopkins University scholar Scott Barrett. Barrett surveys the effectiveness of more than 300 international agreements for environmental protection, ranging from prevention of oil spills, transboundary air pollution and damages from movements of international hazardous waste to protection of nature and wildlife. He finds that only a few of these agreements have met their objectives. Most are ineffective in part because they lack monitoring. Using Earth observations from space for this purpose could radically transform the efficacy of environmental stewardship — and the billions of dollars allocated to it.

 

Why haven’t we realized these tremendous opportunities? Note that in the examples above, these applications transcend the present charters of our federal agencies. Applications such as these call for concerted intergovernmental, international and public-private efforts, linking the NRC report’s vision for the nation and the nation’s role in use of Earth science for the good of all humankind.

 

There is another fundamental, albeit prosaic, problem as well, and this one is quite close to home: tension between the conduct of science for the sake of research — to explore and inform our understanding, to rewrite our science textbooks — and the pursuit of applied benefits. Such a tension has long been an issue among researchers, and is not confined to the Earth sciences. Scientists responding to the injunction to “publish or perish” are not rewarded for applications of their scientific findings to practical purposes, and government agencies often define their role as sponsors of the public good of research, with applications to be left to the private sector.

 

Recognizing this concern, the NRC report states: “Fully realizing societal benefits requires us to enhance understanding among applied users and cultivate appropriate institutional and educational capabilities in organizations that are potential users of applications, and among the agencies that produce the underlying data and supporting science. There is a need for devising professional rewards for those who develop and sustain applications and societal benefits.”

 

To improve the use of space-based data in applications with social and economic benefits, the report provides for mission planning that takes both science and applications into account. These guidelines include:

 

§   identifying processes to move from observations to data to information for applications in the initial planning of new missions; 

 

§   giving priority in mission planning and implementation to linking data to models and decision support tools; and

 

§   ensuring effective lines of communication between mission scientists and decision makers in both policy and management settings.

 

To accomplish this, greater involvement of scientists and practitioners who understand decision- and policymaking, economic development and natural resources, population response to climate and weather variability, and risk assessment and communication is needed throughout the lifecycle of an Earth observations mission. In short, greater involvement of the social science community and active stakeholders is necessary from mission definition and design through operation.

 

We see these as tangible, achievable steps. If we begin to take them now, we will make vast strides in accomplishing the unique opportunity currently open to the Earth sciences: to change “the way we see ourselves, forever.”

 

Roberta Balstad is senior fellow at the Center for International Earth Science Informationa Network, Columbia University, and co-director of Columbia’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. Anthony C. Janetos is director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Maryland. Molly K. Macauley is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future. All three authors served on the NRC report committee.