Page 9 - Frontier technologies to protect the environment and tackle climate change - Executive Summary

Frontier technologies to protect the environment and tackle climate change

such as pollution, water quality and biodiversity. It has enabled the city to prepare for future
floods, simulating which buildings will be flooded, which infrastructure will need to be closed,
and more.

Digital twinning could hold the key to improved disaster response in cities, although to best
leverage this technology, cities will still need to define their approach, establish how the project
will be managed end to end, facilitate the widespread adoption of the end results and be ready
to engage in activities to help combat climate change.

Robotics for monitoring the impacts of climate change underwater, and observing marine life
to help protect biodiversity

Programmable, autonomous or semi-
autonomous and able to interact with
the physical world via sensors and
actuators, robots can be invaluable
tools in tackling climate change.
They can help reduce greenhouse
emissions through monitoring and
preventing their release, optimize
energy consumption through
precision manufacturing or eliminate
product waste through more efficient
use of raw materials. Another major
advantage is the ability of robots to
reach environments inaccessible to humans, from deep under the sea to high above rainforests.

With marine biodiversity particularly at risk, robotics could be key in helping monitor marine
pollution and measure its impacts on marine bio-life. This has been the goal of bio-inspired
robots, the ‘Venus Swarm,’ that have been tested in Venice to survey the MOSE system, which is
intended to defend the Venetian Lagoon from high tide. The Swarm technology, consisting of
several cooperative and coordinated robotic vehicles, has the potential help protect biodiversity
in a host of other areas, too, from obtaining seabed data on acidification, salinity or direction
of marine currents to monitoring oil platforms and managing migratory flows.

Monitoring ice sheets, ice caps, predicting sea-level rise and global weather patterns with
Space 2.0 technologies

Satellite technology has, over the decades, provided unequivocal evidence of the changes
taking place on Earth as a result of climate change. Cutting-edge satellite space 2.0 technologies
(the successor to Space 1.0) are now being deployed to help obtain vital data which scientists
hope will help improve uncertain forecasts for sea-level rises and better predict and understand
global climate patterns.

The report gives a snapshot of NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2),
which was launched in 2018. This is a spacecraft with a single major instrument, deploying an
industrial size, hyper-precise altimeter, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, a
powerful green laser split into six beams that pass over the landscape in programmed patterns.
Alongside the laser is a special telescope monitoring the beams’ reflections, collecting a dozen
photons from each laser pulse 10 000 times per second. ICESat-2 helps map the loss of ice in
Greenland – an accelerating problem – by providing more precise data on ice cover whether

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