Case studies on using earth observations addressing key environmental challenges along the sustainable development goals
Abstract
The United Nation sets 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030, including equality, climate, food safety, finance, etc. This work reports our collective investigations of four SDG goals (#7 Affordable and Clean Energy, #13 Climate Action, #14 Life Below Water, #Life on Land) in the hotspot Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, using synergistic approaches of earth observations (EO) and modeling. We show EO capacities to quantify the solar energy losses from extreme dust conditions in sun-privileged locations such as Egypt. We also urge immediate mitigation actions to be taken in Egypt and the Greater Delta regions, for its severe situation of air pollution, vegetation and underground water losses, food shortage and seawater inundation, threatening human livings of both urban and rural residents. We also demonstrate the applications of artificial intelligence and big data analysis to the climate studies in the MENA region including the Red Sea and the Gulf, such as the use machine learning models in classification and change detection of marine habitats (e.g. mangrove, coral reefs and salt marshes), time series analysis of ozone and chlorophyll-a optimized by the deep neural networks, as well as transfer learning approaches for precision agriculture. These results emphasize the promising usage of EO data analysis to achieve SDGs and suggest the considerable effort should be made to address data gaps to ensure that adequate data are available to inform decision-making on all aspects of the 2030 Agenda.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMIN41A..06P
- Keywords:
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- 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1916 Data and information discovery;
- INFORMATICS;
- 4329 Sustainable development;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 6620 Science policy;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES