Sherry Marin Altman: Organizations need to make informed decisions to operate in a changing climate. Climate change is already affecting the missions, operations, and facilities of organizations worldwide. Rising carbon and greenhouse gas (GHG) levels are causing global environmental changes, such as rising sea levels and temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather.
These changes have a variety of impacts, from flooding to drought to disease outbreaks and chronic food and water shortages. In turn, these impacts have many possible geopolitical implications, including political instability, rises in extremism, epidemics, and humanitarian crises.
Anne Hale Miglarese: Climate change is the driver, while geospatial technologies are a tool to help understand how climate change may impact lives, cities, food supplies, etc. Geospatial technologies provide spatial analysis that helps inform decision-making and policy-making by helping people understand the potential impacts, as well as their options for getting the most bang for the buck. Geospatial tools help us measure, monitor, and hopefully adapt to the effects of climate change.
Sherry: In the climate change arena, most activity to date has been around analysis and mitigation -- GHG inventorying, alternative energy strategies, emissions reductions, etc. But more recently, the conversation is shifting to include greater emphasis on adaptation; this marks a recognition that real changes are happening regardless of what we do on the mitigation front, and organization’s need to prepare for the potential impacts, just as they plan for other potential risks to their operations. Geospatial technologies can enhance the analysis and scenario planning exercises that will ultimately help us to design and prioritize both mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Sherry: People need help making sense of climate change. Geospatial technologies help pull together information and bring out insights people otherwise wouldn’t see. They help people see what’s relevant to their mission and specific areas of responsibility.
It’s difficult to motivate people to act on climate change because the effects of climate change are long-term, dispersed, and cross many kinds of boundaries. We can’t bring all people to see the melting ice caps, but we can bring the visuals to them via geospatial technologies and imagery. We can customize the geographic scope and overlay data to help them understand what is relevant to them.
Anne: That’s a really good point. Geospatial technologies not only help people adapt to climate change in the physical or policy sense, but to the idea that climate change is actually happening. It helps present evidence to aid in understanding the big issues, like the growing desertification and shifting agricultural areas in many areas around the world, and how those issues affect them personally – like why their food bills might be higher.
Sherry: In early 2009, Booz Allen created the Center on Climate Change and Security, also known as Hot House. This internal Center of Excellence signified the company’s commitment to helping clients in this important mission area.
Hot House brings Booz Allen’s full range of expertise to bear on services ranging from policy planning and analysis to program implementation and operational support. We offer unbiased, expert and comprehensive support to clients, ranging from analyzing the ‘so what’ of climate change, to GHG mitigation strategies, to facilitating interagency collaboration, to developing alternative energy projects. We incorporate the contributions of diverse subject matter and functional experts to tackle the large, varied and cross-cutting effects of climate change.
Anne: Geospatial technologies are central to Hot House capabilities. Booz Allen’s cutting-edge Geographic Information System capabilities synthesize multiple kinds and levels of data to create a common operating picture. Center analysts can then visualize and examine specific scenarios with a diverse range of climate change impacts.
The geospatial data informs many of the Center’s other activities, from informing scenario-based workshops, wargames and modeling, to roundtable discussions with senior-level policymakers and subject matter experts. Detailed geospatial analysis enables the Center to track and monitor environment-related social unrest, testing the hypothesis about the connection between environmental and social change.
Sherry: Sure. Booz Allen helped the Army Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI) examine how sustainability relates to political stability. We assessed the sustainability of the natural resource base in the Zambezi Basin, which covers 540,000 square miles (1.4 million square kilometers) in eight countries in southern Africa.
Using a blend of publicly available overhead imagery and geographic information systems, and ecological and natural resource analysis, we’re enabling AEPI to better understand the effect of local and regional environmental impacts on regional political dynamics. We’re also helping address biodiversity health and loss.
Anne: Geospatial technologies have been used for the past 20 years for post-event response to identify areas of impact and allocate resources. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has Operation Blue Roof, in which they analyze aerial imagery after a tornado or hurricane to evaluate damage to roof structures. Those estimates and their locations are then used to distribute blue tarps to areas to help residents cover roof damage.
The Mississippi River flooding earlier this spring is another example. Geospatial technology identified the elevation of the land surrounding the river, the locations of farmland or community settlements, the position and height of levees, and the river flood forcast over time. These estimates were then used to determine where the levees would be breached intentionally to protect communities and the citizens with these towns. Further, we can see how certain factors affect critical infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, roads, power plants, and water and wastewater treatment plants.
Geospatial technologies provide a strong analytical framework for policy decisions, such as who to compensate with Small Business loans and grants after a flood, hurricane, or other disaster. Over the long term, it can help identify critical infrastructure at risk and inform decisions on how to mitigate and/or adapt to those risks. The data can help people build barriers and even relocate communities. It helps answer essential questions such as: What will the communities look like? What do we want them to look like?
Anne: We’re already seeing some. When the tornadoes hit Alabama in April, people used mobile devices to mark where houses had been, but were now gone. In the very near future we will be able to upload this information directly into government and corporate databases to speed the analysis of the disaster and to support government and private insurance investigations. This reflects the future of geospatial technologies, with every citizen as a sensor. For years the geospatial community didn’t consider volunteer data authoritative, but now we have so many citizens with much more accurate sensors, that data has become authoritative and very valuable.
Sherry: Other countries use geospatial technologies to inform policy decisions regarding climate change. These policies have the potential to shake up international alliances and alter economies, and so, they have implications for the United States, regardless of whether the US government has enacted – or wants to enact – similar policies itself. Geospatial technologies’ impact on climate change policies and response both in the United States and around the world will only increase in years to come.
