GHGSat and Carbon Mapper satellites take flight as landfill gas monitoring tech matures

Alaska has deployed a state-of-the-art, multi-agency monitoring system at Barry Arm featuring seismic stations, radar, and tidal gauges that can successfully predict tsunami risks after one year of data collection. Working with community businesses allowed the system to adapt operations and demonstrate how real-time landslide detection can provide crucial location data within minutes of an event.

Okala, a technology company, has developed smart camera traps equipped with a mini-computer and a satellite connection that, with the help of artificial intelligence, send researchers real-time notifications about which species pass by. Real-time camera alerts are not only helping researchers, but also surrounding communities intent on keeping people and crops safe from wild animals.

Citizen science initiatives across Europe are using accessible technology to expose toxic emissions that official monitoring misses, triggering institutional responses ranging from increased enforcement to new pollution-control infrastructure.

A greenhouse that is cooled by seawater and the wind is allowing farmers in Somaliland to grow crops like tomatoes and vegetables despite extreme heat. By creating an environment that is higher in humidity and cooler in temperature, plants don’t need to drink as much water — almost 10 times less water because of the cooling system. There are challenges to scaling the response, but these greenhouses offer farmers the potential to increase their revenue in Africa.

Environmental scientists are using modern computing software to correct, orient, and analyze satellite images from the Corona spy project, launched in the 1960s and ’70s to monitor the Soviet military. The images have revealed human environmental impacts, challenged long-held assumptions, and helped predict future challenges. Within the last two years alone, the images have contributed to new information about climate change including rock glacier movements in Central Asia, shoreline changes in Saudi Arabia, and ice loss in Peru, helping scientists fill in knowledge gaps.

In an experimental garden in Arizona, scientists are seeing how to produce sustainable and local food in a desert environment. They’re growing plants under a photovoltaic “canopy” of solar panels that provide necessary shade for the crops and, at the same time, generate cheap, renewable energy for irrigation systems and farm equipment. So far, they’ve been able to grow basil, Anasazi red beans, and a special bell pepper. While not all crops will work in this system and scaling the garden has its challenges, learning how to grow food in the desert is necessary to adapt to a future with climate change.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, Louisiana and federal officials launched an audacious $50 billion master plan to rebuild the receding coast in an effort to mitigate the effects future storms. These are expensive and massive in scale, and although success is not guaranteed, they're attracting interest from cities around the U.S., and low-lying countries like Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Moving beyond engineered “solutions” of the past, many of these efforts focus on rebuilding land through methods that mimic natural processes for building land mass and vegetation.

Since 2019, Ecuador's Deforestation-Free Coffee Initiative has united nearly 400 Amazon farmers in a model combining agroforestry, satellite monitoring, and traceability systems, resulting in 172.5 metric tons of certified coffee exported to Europe worth $1.7 million. The initiative has also conserved over 1,200 hectares of natural forest.

In response to recurring glacial flooding outbursts, Juneau has implemented an early warning dashboard, $8 million temporary flood barriers, and ongoing scientific research. The solutions are too new to demonstrate measurable flood damage reduction, but increased community participation in preparedness activities is one promising impact.

Scientists are experimenting with a low-cost way of combatting an invasive species and wildfires. They’re using cattle to graze on cheatgrass, which has spread across the U.S. West, disrupted native plants and animals and become a source of fuel for fires. The cows were able to reduce the grass by an average of more than 60 percent, creating an area that could prevent fires from spreading.