NGIS was thrilled to present the game-changing work we have been doing with Google Earth Engine at this year’s virtual Geo for Good Summit. The annual summit, hosted by Google Earth Outreach from November 17 – 20th, gathered nonprofits, scientists, government agencies and other change-makers from around the world who want to leverage mapping tools and technology for positive impact.

Our very own Executive Director, Nathan Eaton, presented on the second day of the summit alongside Google’s Brian Sullivan to discuss sustainable supply chain sourcing. The session focused on how the Google Cloud platform enables organisations to take a data driven approach to global supply chain sustainability.

Nathan’s presentation included a look at the work NGIS has been doing with organisations to build sustainability solutions that bring all of the wonderful Google technology together. For example, one of the world’s largest buyers of palm oil, Unilever, joined forces with Google and experts from NGIS to raise sustainable sourcing standards for suppliers and bring Unilever closer to its goal of a deforestation-free supply chain by 2023.

Nathan also showed attendees the recently updated Coastal Risk Australia Platform that uses Google Earth Engine to display the severity of rising seas based on the latest scientific modelling, via an interactive web map. This allows the public to search how rising sea levels may encroach on their community over the next century. Check out the platform here: https://coastalrisk.com.au/

Another talented team member, Yvonne Fong, Data Scientist, from NGIS and EO Data Science was asked to present in the ‘What’s new in Earth Engine?’ Plenary session that looked at a year’s worth of developments in Earth Engine and how they are making Earth Engine even more scalable for an ever-growing group of users.

Yvonne’s presentation focused on the progress of the GEO-GEE program that commenced in mid-2020. The program currently supports 32 projects across 22 countries using open Earth Observation data to tackle global challenges related to Sustainable Development Goals, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction. The projects were awarded USD$3 million towards product licenses and USD$1 million in technical support from EO Data Science to help them create impact.

If you want to learn more about how these game-changing projects are using Google Earth Engine to tackle environmental and social challenges, check out our GEO-GEE program blog series here: https://newsroom.eodatascience.com/tag/geeimpact
Announcements made at the summit

It wouldn’t be the Geo for Good Summit without an exciting announcement! This year Google Earth announced they are welcoming Earth Engine apps as a full member of their product family. Furthermore, the new Apps header doesn’t include “experimental,” and can include a header image uploading during the “Create App” step to give users more operations to customise the appearance of their Apps.

Since launching in 2018, more than 50,000 Earth Engine apps have been created to share Earth Engine analyses. To see examples of the kinds of interfaces you can build with Apps, check out the curated Apps page here: https://www.earthengine.app/

If you weren’t able to make this year’s Geo for Good Summit or would like to rewatch any of the sessions, all the summit talks are now available for on demand viewing on YouTube.