generating rage for many who fear losing their jobs or otherwise being left behind. elizabeth dwoskin, the brilliant silicon valley reporter for the washington post will in fact be discussing some of these topics tomorrow. all these problems are extremely challenging, and we need to find ways to address them. but they shouldn t make us lose sight of the fact that technology can also help us accomplish great things. it ultimately comes down to how the various tools our very clever species is creating get used, and that depends on the values, ethics, and goals of those wielding them, as well as how democratically and equitably these fruits wind up getting shared. so it s a great privilege for us to be able to present to you now someone who has created initiatives over the past couple of decades that may just be the most inspiring and positive uses of cutting-edge technology we have ever run across. rebecca moore is a visionary engineer and computer scientist who conceived and leads the google earth outreach program, which supports nonprofits, communities, and indigenous peoples around the world in applying state-of-the-art mapping tools to some of the world s most pressing problems, including the defense of human rights, environmental conservation, and transitioning to clean energy and a sustainable society. she first realized the potential of mapping tools in activism when she was able to use the then brand new google earth application to help stop the logging of over a thousand acres of redwoods in her own santa cruz mountain community in 2005. and she hasn t stopped since. [applause] google earth outreach has helped hundreds of communities, from amazonian tribes fighting to protect their ancestral lands, to cities and towns dealing with toxic methane leaks invisible from the ground, to regions seeking to green their energy supply. and she more recently initiated and led the development of google earth engine, a powerful global scale data mining of satellite imagery that can help monitor the health of earth s life-sustaining resources, and achieve a hitherto unprecedented understanding of our changing environment, and put this data into the hands of those among us who can take action. i will let rebecca explain the exciting new work she and her team and new allies are doing. but i ll just end by saying that if we are to succeed in transitioning away from the destructive trajectory our species is currently on, we re going to need at least as good data and as effective tools as those who seek to protect the status quo possess, and there is no one on this planet who s doing more to equip us with the best technological tools than a true eco-saint in my pantheon, rebecca moore. [applause] good morning, bioneers. [audience responds] it is so thrilling for me to be back here again. i have missed you guys. so we re going to talk about earth s vital signs. and think about it. when you go to the doctor, you can get your heart function measured, your lungs, your brain, all these things. you can get all kinds of tests done. but what about the planet? what about the amazon that produces the oxygen that we breathe, or all the river systems of the world that are like the bloodstream? where can we all go and know how healthy are those critical systems of our earth? it has been basically nowhere. so if there s ever been a moment to harness technology in service of planetary health, this is it. right? [applause] alright. so i m going to start not with big data but with small data, because as joshua mentioned, i got my start in my own community, and i believe that s a very great way to start out as an activist, because you learn and then you can scale. so i started in the santa cruz mountains. this was about 10 years ago. i think some of my community members are even here today. we got this letter in the mail, notice of intent to harvest timber. can you read this map? [laughter] nobody could read this map. right? black lines means that s where the logging s going to happen, but black lines are the roads and everything else. so most people simply threw it out. but google earth had just come out, and i m a nerd, and i m a mapping nerd, and i said, i wonder if i remap this, if i study this plan and remapped it in the full 3d satellite imagery of this new google earth, could we understand what was at stake? maybe it was nothing to worry about, or maybe it was. let s find out, so over that weekend, i brought in the data. right? you could make 3d models of a helicopter hauling logs, because they were going to be doing that, hauling logs over the daycare center and the nursery school. we--i showed it at a community meeting, and people were horrified, because now you could really see it was going to be 1,000 acres, six miles long, how close it was going to be to so many aspects of our community life. we called ourselves neighbors against irresponsible logging, or nail. our mascot was charlie the beaver because beavers are responsible loggers. right? [laughter] they re not greedy. [applause] so, again, this is back in time, but this is google earth 10 years ago. this is rebecca 10 years ago. but i was asked to present this google earth logging flyover to all these political groups, to the media, and so on, beuse no one understood the official plan, but they could understand in a few seconds what was wrong when they saw it in google earth. my neighbors were writing and saying, i thought i understood until i saw it in google earth; now i m shocked and appalled. the chronicle talked about green eyes in the sky as a new tool, satellite imagery for environmentalists. by the way, i hope you're fastening your seatbelts because i m going to really try to go here. activists start googling in the wall street journal; technology builds bigger soap box, using this kind of approach. and then it was even put on the cbs evening news. newscaster: tonight a battle is brewing in the south bay over plans to log 1,000 acres of land. tony rusimano shows us exactly what s at stake. [tony]: we're taking a google earth virtual flyover along a five-mile length of los gatos creek, between lexington reservoir and lake elsman in the santa cruz mountains. the area in red, totaling 1,000 acres, is land that san jose water company wants to log. the map was created by a software engineer who lives in the area, and it s being used to galvanize opposition to the company s plans. [interviewee]: so instead of having an abstract map, people can actually see their houses, see their schools, see where the logging zone is, and it changes an abstract concept to something that is quite striking. [rebecca]: that s the key an abstract concept. that kind of abstract map doesn t grab you the way when you can present it in the context of the real planet, then you can understand. so we used this technique to raise awareness, and ultimately to prove that the plan was not only a bad idea, but we used google earth to prove that it was illegal, and we stopped the logging. [applause] yeah. and it gets better, because we ve always had this feeling in our community that, okay, we stopped it, but we really won't feel safe until it s permanently protected. and just a few months ago, a bill was passed, funding was secured, it s going to become a new open space park in the santa cruz mountains. [applause] yay! so that s how i started, with 1,000 acres. right? so then, okay, fast forward. we launched a new version of google earth. my team now has built, rebooted google earth, and with everything that we ve learned over this decade, we realize the heart of it is storytelling, tying the issues and the concerns and the dreams and the solutions and the challenges and all of that to the land. right? and this is also, by the way, a very indigenous tool, because of tying the people s dreams and so on to the landscape. and we ve invented this new digital magazine of the planet we call voyager. if you take a look at google earth, it s on web, android, and ios, and every week we re updating it with stories, and as you can see, there s a bit of an environmental bent nature stories, stories about climate change. we re trying to educate the world about the world, things they need to know. yeah. [applause] there s fun stuff in there. this is my current personal favorite voyager story, is the brown bears of katmai national park. this is a live bear cam. so we re putting live nature cams in here, like bird cams and so on, so you can see what s going on right now. if you go in there, you see things like this. [audience responds] right? [laughter] we want to bring the world alive, this digital, dynamic planet, this beautiful place that we live, have everybody understand and be able to celebrate it. there s a panel this afternoon, and madhu from nature conservation foundation in india is going to be talking about a voyager story they published that links indigenous knowledge in india about this particular bird that has been believed for centuries to be the predictor of when the monsoon seasonal rains will come, and he actually proved it using google earth engine, that those indigenous that traditional knowledge is correct. so he s going to talk about that this afternoon. alright. are we done? no. because these the storytelling and the visualization is fantastic, but we have a problem, houston, the world is changing dramatically in ways observable from space. you can see, for example, deforestation in the amazon. we were approached again, this is about eight years ago by brazilian scientists who said, yeah, we love google maps, we love google earth, but what we really need is to deal with the fact that we re losing a million acres a year of amazon rainforest. it s happening typically illegally, in parts of the forest where there s not good law enforcement on the ground. however, there s daily satellite imagery that is free, public domain, that we could build a virtual alerting system. we can use science to detect the change, we could alert people, but the problem is it s like petabytes of data. most people don't even know what that is. it s billions of megabytes of data. if you're going to try to manage all that satellite imagery, and if you try to then do the analysis, it takes weeks on a single computer. and they said, so we re stuck. it s so tempting. we could do it, but we need scale. so that s when google earth engine was conceived, in the brazilian amazon. because we do have a few computers at google. [laughter] and they re running youtube, and gmail and search, and so on, well why not have them run an environmental analytical engine for the planet? yeah. [applause] so that s google earth engine, an environmental planetary scale engine to help us understand, map, measure, and monitor what s going on on earth. and as i said, there s all this incredible data while we re sitting here. thousands of images, different types of scientific observations are being made about the state of the planet. the problem is it s typically going on to tapes in a vault somewhere in a government archive. this is where 40 years of landsat imagery go in a vault in south dakota, back to the vietnam war era imagery that no one has ever seen. it s fantastic. how can we liberate that, bring that online, and make it available to scientists and anyone who wants to turn those pixels into knowledge, is the way i think about it. and, again, that s what we did with earth engine. we spent three years bringing all that data online, the historic data, and the new data as it s being collected, co-located with massive computing to derive the insights that we need to understand what s changing and what kind of solutions are possible. so once we built that, we said, well, we have these three plus decades of imagery, what would it look like if we stitched together a global, panable, zoomable planetary timelapse, like as you think of going into goog earth or google maps, but instead of it being one time period, it s an animated video of the planet. and it was fascinating when we did that, it s an animated video of the planet. because, for example, we re looking at las vegas growing, the stest growing city in the us. las vegas growing while lake mead shrinks. hmm that s interesng, isn t it? heres deforestation in bolivia. it wld be artistically beautiful if it weren t sad. right? this is the alberta tar sands. [audience responds] right? it s like we are locusts on the landscape, aren we? but there are beautiful things too, geologic features like here we re seeing the shifting sands of cape c beaches. so there s a kind of lycal quality there. so building that timelapse, we had to analyze five million satellite images. it was three quadrillion pixels. we ran it on 66,000 computers in parallel so that we could produce it. and we had it in a couple days. on a single computer, it would have taken 300 years. [audience responds] yeah. so we re like, okay, let s fire this puppy up and do some other stuff. [laughter] so the first big scientific vital sign, you might say, was working with one of the world s leading scientists, matt hansen, at university of maryland, to create the first high resolution, fresh map of the state of the world s forests, where they re still intact, where they re disappearing, where they re growing back because of reforestation efforts. that was published in the journal science. it s been incredibly highly cited. that was a million hours of computation, would have taken 15 years on a single computer. you get the idea. but we don't want to just produce scientific papers, we want to drive change on the ground, so what s also important is now we ve operationalized running that every week, and the data goes into an application that you can check out called globalforestwatch.org. so there s real transparency now on what s happening to the forests of the world. [cheer] yes! [applause] now the people that are it s a cat-and-mouse game. the people that are doing in some cases the illegal logging, they used to log during the dry season, because that was more convenient for their trucks and so on, but now they know they can be seen from space, so they re logging during the rainy season. and they used to be able to get away with that, but now there s radar. [laughter] and we bring all the radar data into earth engine, and this group, instituto socioambiental in brazil, developed a radar-based algorithm, and they saw this line developing of change in the heart of the amazon, not near any roads. they re like, is this a bug in what we built, or is there something really there? finally, they sent a plane. yes. [audience responds] it was an illegal mining operation. they got it shut down immediately, law enforcement, and so on and so on. [applause] what s also exciting is then the follow-on knowledge that can come. so 90% or so of the endangered species of the world are forest dependent. so if you want to stop species extinction, just protect the forests. right? it s not complicated. this fantastic scientific study was done, and this is where we talk about mapping solutions that determined if we just preserve the existing intact tiger habitat on the planet, not only can we stop loss of tigers, we could double the global tiger population by 2022. so it s a recipe for conservation. [applause] yeah. alright. now let s switch to fisheries. so something like 20% of the seafood that we eat is caught illegally or unsustainably in some way. this is what you see. so there s a moratorium in china for a month once a year to allow fisheries to recover. this is what happens on the day that moratorium is up. so let s zoom out a little bit. [audience responds] let s zoom out a little more. it s a bad day to be a fish on that day. and the problem is no one has ever had been able to zoom even further out and know what s going on in the high seas, which is the global commons. right? owned by all of us, but owned by no one nation, and therefore not well protected. so we ve built now, with oceana and skytruth, a tool called global fishing watch, and it s bringing in all the data on all these vessels who are beamg their position for maritime safety, but now can be used to mane and understand how we can fish sustainably, because fisheries are collapsing, but it s well known that if we can just conserve and fish a little more intelligently, the oceans could be abundant for generations to come. so we just need to be smarter with this. yeah. [applause] you can see the tracks of individual vessels. you can determine using ai are they trawling, are they long-lining, are they just transiting? and again, you might say, oh, are we invading their privacy? well, think about the balance between how the global commons of the ocean has been so systematically abused. so it seems a small concession that you would let your position be known in exchange for ensuring that we re fishing sustainably. the green area is a new protected area that went into effect in the kiribati islands. you can see before and after. it looks good. right? looks good. the fishing cleared out. however, about a month later, you see that one vessel that went through and was fishing illegally after it had been turned into a protected area. the government of kiribati impounded the vessel, but the captain said, you have no proof that we [audience responds] yeah. yes. [applause] and this is critical for these small island nations. they don't have the us navy. they have maybe thousands of islands. how are they going to protect their waters? this is a way to virtually ensure that these protected areas are truly protected, they re not just paper parks. the fine, by the way, the captain said we d like to move to settlement discussion once the proof was given to them. it resulted in a $2.2 million fine, which is 1% of the company s of the country s gdp. indonesia, seafood is incredibly important for their diet. the minister of fisheries, minister susi, has now adopted global fishing watch for her government s use. she is quite something. because there s a lot of illegal fishing in indonesia s waters. if she knows a boat is illegal, she will warn the crew, they get off the boat, and then she blows it up. [laughter] you do what you ve got to do. alright. so there s also a very strong science aspect. all this data that we ve produced, we re making available openly for scientists, economists, ecologists to study and understand what are these patterns and how do they relate to slave trade or sustainable fishing and so on. so it s really exciting. we think that s a key part of it as well. david kroodsma, who s the lead author on this, he s from global fishing watch, he will be on the panel this afternoon giving a deeper dive on global fishing watch. talking about solutions, using this data, five new marine protected areas were created. we re looking here at the waters off mexico. mexico wanted to create a new large marine protected area, but the local fishing industry said, oh no, you're going to destroy our livelihood, but showing that area in red and bringing in the fishing watch data, they said, it s only 4% of your total activity. and it s also well known that when you set aside an area it creates a nursery that makes the surrounding area more abundant anyway. so with that data, it was approved. right? right. [applause] i want to keep going. so switching now to climate, we have amazing 3d data in google earth and google maps. if you fly into the cityscape of san francisco or new york, you see these beautiful 3d buildings. well, what if we could turn that into an understanding of the solar potential of every rooftop in the world? [applause] and that s what we ve done with project sunroof. you can go there. you can enter your own address. you can see the solar potential for your house. but also, we ve done it for all ese citi. wee lookin london.ight? we know for every 10 centimeters square, for every 10-minute period of every day of the year, what is the solar potential, taking into account shading and everything else. so we have very precise information of the potential for cities, countries to go solar. we packaged that up into a tool that we launched at the one planet summit and the global climate action summit, if some of you know about that a couple of weeks ago. we called it the environmental insights explorer. san jose took that data and they ve become the first city to commit to becoming a gigawatt solar city. [applause] because they were they knew they could be that ambitious because we showed them you could generate 3.4 gigawatts. so one gigawatt seems reasonable. we re giving them the data to increase their level of ambition. the closing here is i want to say a little bit about some of the work with indigenous people and indigenous mapping. some of you may know we did a project with an amazon tribe, chief almir surui. there s a lot of issues of invasion of land, taking of resources from indigenous communities with we had fantastic success recently with a quilombola community. these are the descendants of escaped slaves in africa who have no land rights. this community had been trying for 23 years to get the rights to the land that they ve been living on for generations. they could never get it until with their ability to make maps and show that they could map and manage and monitor their land, the land was turned over to them just a couple of months ago. yeah. [applause] so i opened with my personal map. i want to close with a personal map created by the next generation. could we have erica persons come out here? [applause] erica is erica. [applause] i m going to she s given me the honor of letting me present her map, which is a really big deal. so erica is coastal miwok and blackfoot. she has been participating for several months in a project through the bioneers indigeneity program, working with my google earth outreach team to teach mapping skills to the native youth, and they decided they wanted to come up with a map of gentrification for oakland. now, i wanted to start this is not her map. i wanted to start with this map, because this is the typical map you see, which is government data produced by people who don't live in the area, and it s like based on the sale of housing, the prices of housing and so on. it s a fine map for that, but it s a little cold. i don't know what i would say. it s impersonal. what erica, she led the group in doing, is making what i would call a personal map from the inside of the experience of a person affected by gentrification, whose home was taken away, who became homeless and had to learn how to find resources in oakland if you need food, if you need a shower, if you need a phone to reach people because you don't have a phone anymore, like how can you find these resources in your community, and how can you tell the story of what it feels like to go through that? so this is a map that she and her peers made with these... it was like a proactive, if you re in this situation, here are resources that could help you. right? [applause] right? she deserves it. yeah. right? i m just flipping through it, but dig this. she told the story of her own home. okay? i m going to try not to cry. that s her home before on the left, and then after it was gentrified, they were evicted, and so on. so to me this this is where the heart and soul of mapping can come in, when we can empower, in this case the next generation, to tell these important stories and hold those in power accountable, not let this kind of thing to keep happening. so thank you, erica, and thank you, all. that s it. [applause] kkkkkkkkc >> hello everyone, and welcome to "focus on europe." it's nice to have you here with me. there will be a really special party here in europe pretty soon, and it'll be taking place in the united kingdom. that's because queen elizabeth the second will soon be celebrating 70 years on the throne. to put that into perspective, back when coronated, world war the queen was coronated, worlds earlier, and europe was still very much divided. since then, she's been the undisputed symbol of great britain, accompanying the union through all sorts of political changes, always dutifully, and always in style.