Climate change is causing rapid environmental changes that have a direct impact upon our security. This calls for innovative technological solutions. NATO has launched a new project that uses Big Earth Datacube Analytics to provide transnational security and protection for the environment. Today (5 May 2022), marked its launch at an event hosted in Brussels by NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme (SPS), which featured the participation of project stakeholders and expert from Israel, Germany, Israel and Switzerland.
The Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published this year shows that extremes such as heat waves and heavy precipitation are increasing in frequency. While NATO is not the first to respond to every challenge associated with climate change, the Alliance can play a part in a comprehensive response. At the 2021 Brussels Summit, Allies approved a Climate Change and Security Action Plan. Climate change could also be included in the next Strategic Concept which will be adopted by NATO Summit in Madrid at end of June. The future will be a challenge because it will be difficult to monitor climate change continuously and to establish early warning capabilities that can ensure the safety and protection of our people.
Cube4EnvSec will be a multi-year, multi-year NATO Science for Peace and Security Program (SPS) Project. It will include experts from Germany and Israel as well as experts from Denmark. As security and climate change are becoming a major priority for the Alliance’s, the NATO SPS Programme aims to increase its engagement with Allies, partner nations, and other countries on this shared challenge. Cube4EnvSec will show how datacubes can provide agile insights onto Big Earth Data, in keeping with the Programme’s decades of experience in addressing environmental security problems. This will be done in line with the Programme’s decades of experience. Rene Heise from NATO Headquarters’ Climate and Energy Security Section said, “This new generation (1-10 cm) of high-resolution imagery will provide greater quality and precision to procedures such change analysis for unstable airfields (e.g. Flood simulations, harbour security in the event of sea level rise and land slide risk.
This technology can be applied in many cases, including harbour protection and thunderstorm warning for aviation. The High North will be especially affected by attempts to integrate warnings from satellite weather events. The project will demonstrate the benefit of spatio-temporal datacubes such as satellite, climate and high-dynamics meteorological/oceanographic (METOC) data offered in a ready-to-use analysis. Dr. Peter Baumann, one co-director of the project, explained that the project aims to demonstrate the benefits of massive space/time-federated datacubes, which are a key enabler in better understanding the planet. He is based at Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany.