Google Earth Engine provides reliable insights into climate change to help organizations progress their sustainability efforts

Access to powerful, data-driven scientific solutions could transform the climate change crisis from a trigger for despair into a catalyst for action. Mindful of the pivotal role data analytics could play in mitigating the crisis, Google has made Google Earth Engine available to businesses and governments as an enterprise-grade service through Google Cloud, and it has authorized DoiT to resell and support this product. 

Armed with a service capable of driving geospatial processing at scale, organizations can identify and analyze links between human activity and environmental degradation with a view to creating a more sustainable future. 

What is Google Earth Engine?

Google Earth Engine launched in 2010 as a geospatial processing service that scientists and NGOs use to analyze peta-byte size geospatial datasets. Driven by Google Cloud Platform and designed for planetary-scale environmental monitoring, it blends satellite data and earth observation datasets with powerful cloud computing to deliver up-to-date, detailed insights about the condition of the physical environment and how it is changing. 

More than 70 petabytes of curated and analysis-ready geospatial data enable it to detect trends and understand correlations between human activities and environmental degradation. This wealth of data includes four decades of historical satellite imagery and scientific datasets, including data such as the Landsat and Sentinel series of satellites and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), as well as geophysical, weather, climate and demographic data. 

Supported by these robust datasets and offering powerful geospatial algorithm development and computation platform at scale, Google Earth Engine is already beginning to bring greater transparency and traceability to commodity supply chains, supporting climate resilience and allowing for more sustainable management of natural resources such as forests and water.

How can organizations use it? 

The detrimental effects of planetary change have been palpable across every major economic sector for some time, but businesses and organizations have not had a comprehensive way of predicting them and managing them until now. 

Since Google launched the preview of Earth Engine in Google Cloud in October 2022, it has been engaging with multiple companies and organizations across industries as diverse as consumer packaged goods and insurance companies to agriculture technology and the public sector - who are starting to leverage Google Earth Engine’s satellite imagery and geospatial data in inspiring ways. The service delivers custom, action-oriented insights to help conserve environments, eliminate emissions and drive sustainable performance. 

Insurance companies are using it for climate risk assessments. Agricultural businesses are discovering ways to ​​decarbonize their agricultural practices, using Google Earth Engine to report and verify regenerative and sustainable techniques. Energy producers can rely on its live wind and weather data to continuously optimize renewable energy production. 

What are Google Earth Engine’s key features?

Google Earth Engine features are designed to meet the needs of a wide range of users, including developers and business customers. The heart of the service is data analytics, so customers get easy access to both a wide range and long time series of data. Combined with large-scale processing, this wealth of reliable data allows analysts to generate more meaningful insights and more accurate predictions. 

Driven by the power of Google Cloud, Google Earth Engine delivers fast and accurate results. Partnering this speed with a web-based IDE coding environment focused on hypothesis testing enables swift responses to important questions and allows users to test hypotheses quickly so that product development can proceed at pace.

Google Earth Engine is a fully managed service with a deeply knowledgeable user ecosystem to ensure real benefits are realized fast. It features JavaScript and Python wrapper functions to interpret complex geospatial analysis. Non-coders can access geospatial tools and view insights via interactive experiences created using its library of UI components. 

Developer-specific features

For developers, Google Earth Engine offers a public data catalog, compute infrastructure, geospatial APIs and an interactive app server. They can connect to the service via one of the full-featured JavaScript, Python or REST APIs and integrate it with powerful analytics and tools including BigQuery and Vertex AI

Where next?

To access Google Earth Engine for commercial use, contact DoiT, your certified Google Earth Engine Partner. Working with a certified GEE Partner enables you to leverage the resource in ways that best suit your business. We will assess your needs and guide you on the most appropriate data and data storage options for your use case. 

There is still time to safeguard the planet for future generations. Climate change experts are calling the next ten years the “Decade of Action,” a crucial time to act to address the impact of climate change. Everyone from businesses to governments will need to adopt transformational change to make a global difference, but Google Earth Engine can help you contribute to that change.