Big [Complex] Picture dots together. Technological advances in fields including artificial intelligence, big data, satellite imagery and more are enabling scientists to think even bigger and faster than before. Problems that would have taken months, years, or even decades to quantify, let alone understand are being understood at speeds unimaginable in the past. Robots aren’t ‘replacing’ scientists, or indeed anyone working in the wider STEM sector. On the contrary, when applied to the interrogation of scientific questions, technological advances are enabling researchers and practitioners in these and related fields to reach new discovery and innovation heights, which in the domain of space research is a statement that can be taken literally.
Space research may not seem an obvious place to look for insights into how to build circular economies down here on Earth. But, space crafts and stations are a place where a crew’s survival is reliant on ultra-efficient use of resources, thus teams from the likes of NASA and ESA have produced many notable innovations in the domain of resource efficiency. Both satellite and other forms of advanced space and arial imaging are already empowering government agencies, NGOs, corporations, and academics to track everything from pollution to illegal logging to statechanges in ecosystem health. Those that imagine that it’s still possible for acts such as illegal dumping of chemicals to go un-noticed and untraced may be surprised to know that the resolution on some satellite imaging is so fine that the dimples on a golfball can be seen from space. Thus, whereupon they cause discolouration of water and their volume is large enough, chemicals flows entering river systems can be seen-atsource, or near enough to. Furthermore, sensors calibrated at the nanoscale and distributed in monitoring systems embedded in the likes of sewage infrastructure and floating vessels can track both chemical and other agents, biological included, which further technologies can then match to origin with forensic accuracy. In short, ultimately, there is nowhere for environmental polluters to hide, and particularly given unfolding advances in environmental monitoring technologies of myriad classes of the e-tech, bio-tech, and hybrid kind.
In seeing the ebbs and flows of Earth’s socio-ecological and wider systems unfold in real or near-to-real time ours is increasingly the capacity to make informed choices about where and why we make interventions. The implications for policy are significant, because now the likes of the World Bank, United Nations, and governments worldwide need not guess the impacts of resource extraction and other sourcing processes, and can instead draw on precise data that both quantities the scale of the problem now, and with that, see not one, but multiple trajectories thanks to advances in modelling software. However, though some real and near-to-real time environmental data is beyond wider reach, increasing amounts are available to academia, industry, and even the general public. Thus, ever more of those with an interest in holding corporations and governments accountable for unsustainable practices and policies are becoming empowered to take informed actions, and to do so with speed.
As many not few come around again to the idea of holism - of recognising the connections between us, every action we choose to take, and the rest of the world - innovations that seek to both mitigate risks, while harnessing emerging market opportunities abound. So much so that the challenge before us is not so much one of availability of innovative ideas, but of developing adequate means to evaluate those ideas - of due diligence. In a world nigh consumed by content of copious digital and other form, syphoning the innovation wheat from the chaff is no easy task. Innovation Against All Odds
P23