World Environment Day – Time for Nature
June 5th is World Environment Day. It is most renowned day for environmental action. This year, the theme is biodiversity.
Biodiversity is foundational, it supports all life on land and below water. It affects human health, providing clean air and water, nutritious foods, disease resistance, and climate change mitigation.
However, human actions, including deforestation, encroachment on wildlife habitats, intensified agriculture, and acceleration of climate change, have pushed nature beyond its limit.
The UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Programme (IPP) is supporting organisations to use space technology to solve development challange across a wide range of sectors, including solutions to reduce and prevent de-forestation, improve biodiversity and increase climate resilience in agriculture.
IPP has funded six projects on forestry and land management which are providing tools to support improved forest governance. When applied, these are expected to ultimately slow deforestation rates in project regions by providing local forest authorities with actionable intelligence. Furthermore, a cost effectiveness analysis of the forestry projects found that space-enabled solutions where 11.8 times more cost effective in the long term when compared to non-space alternatives. The video below provides a snapshot of the positive impact that the IPP is having on preventing deforestation through using space solutions.
