Welcome to the third edition of the enviroLENS Newsletter. As the COVID-19 pandemic shaped our reality and consequent measures affected all of us, we hope that you and your families stayed safe and healthy. In most countries, the situation seems to be calming down. As we look for ways to continue with our activities adapting to the new circumstances, we hope you will enjoy our news. 

In this issue, we invite you to read the opinion piece prepared by Li Ning from IUCN's Environmental Law Centre, one of our consortium partners, pondering about ways that satellite technology, big data analysis, and machine learning can help us bring forward the transformational change called for in the environmental sector. Kindly check the updates related to the six potential cases we are working on, to illustrate the potential of the eLENS Portal. We are also sharing several reports, such as the Essential Variables List, Data Warehouse report, and eLENS Demo EO Services Design.

For those of you that joined us recently, welcome! enviroLENS is responding to the demands of the jurisdictional sector for ready-to-access evidence and scenario information on environmental situations. Our mission is to facilitate the utilization of European satellite capacities provided by Copernicus for environmental law enforcement and related cross-cutting sectors. 

We thank you for joining us on this journey and hope that you will enjoy it as much as we do! 

Best regards,
The enviroLENS team

By Ning Li, IUCN’s Environmental Law Centre Programme Coordinator

SpaceX has made numerous eyebrow-raising headlines in the past 10-15 years - that does not look likely to change in 2020. In January, Scientific America reported that it might have broken the U.S National Environmental Policy Act through the Starlinks project. The growth and success of SpaceX, a revolutionary company, is naturally exposed to both doubt and criticism. Still, none can deny its achievements and the transformational change it has brought to the development of space technology and services.

Transformational change is not only expected to occur in the commercial world. It has also become a buzzword in the non-profit sector. UNDP’s report defines it as “the process whereby positive development results are achieved and sustained over time by institutionalising policies, programmes, and projects within national strategies.”

Now, when it comes to global environmental protection in the past 100 years, a transformational change can be traced back to the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, which marked the beginning of a new era that recognises environmental issues as a global concern. Since then, we have seen the rapid development of a new branch of law: the environmental one.  It aims to ensure a safe and sustained human development, without undue cost to nature.
 

Effective implementation of environmental law has been supported by traditional approaches, such as awareness-raising, capacity building, dialogues, etc. In recent years, new technologies have been introduced and applied, such as satellite monitoring. Earth observation technology has been used to monitor the implementation of multilateral environmental agreements such as the World Heritage Convention, the Convention of Biological Diversity, Ramsar Convention, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. International and some national courts have used satellite imagery as a supporting means of proof. New platforms such as the global fishing watch are taking advantage of the power of satellite technology to provide near real-life monitoring of global fishing operations. A missing point though seems to be a link between geospatial information and policy and legal information. A bridge that could integrate separate sectors, bringing us the long-awaited transformational change by assisting environmental governance decision-makers.

It is encouraging to see that one initiative is making its way to create a truly integrated system combining both domains. enviroLENS,  a Horizon 2020 innovation project funded by the European Commission, aims to demonstrate and promote the use of Earth Observation (EO) as direct evidence for environmental law compliance and enforcement. By using European satellite capacities, such as those provided by Copernicus, enviroLENS responds to the demands of the environmental legal sector in the context of evidence-based decision-making processes. It explores the technical potential to link satellite imagery, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and law to develop cost-effective means for legal evidence collection and monitoring of compliance.

On one platform, enviroLENS will offer three tools. Users will be able to find relevant laws and regulations concerning a specific geographic area and issue via the legislation discovery tool. The exploration tool will provide an overview of a situation by directly comparing earth observation data of two different timestamps in a user-friendly environment. The alert and monitoring service will use the EU Copernicus capacities and will provide high-quality change detection information on land use and land cover for effective and efficient environmental protection.  Apart from the Copernicus capacities, the alert and monitoring service will integrate very high-resolution datasets, allowing for the detection of local events on a small scale. These tools are being tested in multiple use-cases for its prototype development, including protection of key bird habitat in Montenegro, deforestation and forest management in Armenia, and Lamu Port construction in Kenya.

The success of enviroLENS might be seen as a small step when considering a transformational change for environmental compliance and implementation, but an important one to catalyse technological revolution that could lead to such a change at the end. Seeing how SpaceX has rocked the space industry, we have a reason to believe that satellite technology, together with big data analysis, machine learning and other tools can help us observe and better protect the planet we live on. With committed will and joint actions, we shall be on the right track.