Beyond Borders Satellite Applications for Humanitarian Emergencies

Metadata

• Author: caribou.space
• Full Title: Beyond Borders: Satellite Applications for Humanitarian Emergencies
• Category: articles
• Document Tags: #geospatial
• URL: https://www.caribou.space/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Caribou-Space-Beyond-Borders-Public_V1.pdf

Highlights

• Satellite Earth Observation (EO) is the gathering of information about the physical, chemical, and biological systems of the planet via remote-sensing technologies. (View Highlight)
• Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are a constellation of satellites providing positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) signals from space. GNSS is used to track people and physical objects at any time, globally. It is also widely used in humanitarian emergencies for geo-tagging of relevant issues in the humanitarian context, e.g., infrastructure, disasters, damages, conflict incidents, response activities, etc. (View Highlight)
• In parallel, new entrants and developments in SatComms and Satellite Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential to enable new and more cost-effective connectivity to people and things in the near future. (View Highlight)
• The most persistent and extensive humanitarian data gaps include a lack of information on affected schools, malnutrition, damaged infrastructure like buildings and roads, and refugees, internally displaced persons, and persons of concern. (View Highlight)
• Satellite EO can be particularly powerful in supporting predictive analytics for slow-developing crises, for example, in the context of food insecurity predicting weak crop yields months before the harvest season, or to anticipate violence and understand the drivers of conflict. (View Highlight)
• Satellite applications provide:
  • More timely decision-making through real-time and predictive modelling • Decision-making supported by greater accuracy of data • Greater confidence in the decision-making process • Greater accountability across stakeholders (View Highlight)
• Data from satellite applications has the specific advantages of coverage, objectivity, repeatability, thematic detail, speed, and affordability. (View Highlight)
• Supply-side organisations include:
  • Private suppliers: satellite operators and resellers, cloud computing providers, platform/ solution providers, and hardware/software suppliers
  • Public suppliers: satellite operators, and analytics providers • Academia • NGOs • Media • Development Agencies (View Highlight)
• Demand-side organisations include: 6
  • Governments • First Responders • Private Sector • Academia • NGOs • Media • Development Agencies • Affected Public • General Public (View Highlight)
• The highest number (92) of identified applications are for “food, security, nutrition and famine” events in Africa. (View Highlight)
• Many of the data gaps identified by Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) in sectors such as health and education could be addressed by satellite applications. (View Highlight)
• Based on the ability of the development community to help address the issue, a subset of eight barriers are prioritised for interventions:
  • User awareness and resistance • Inadequate monitoring and evaluation • Data availability • Ethics and privacy • Technical expertise and skills • Financing for application development and scaling • Procurement challenges • Piloting and duplication (View Highlight)
• User awareness & resistance
  Recommended Development Community Interventions
  • Document existing examples and case studies • Share information via an open online knowledge base • Virtual and real-world knowledge events (View Highlight)
• Ethics & privacy
  • Document and share ethics and privacy best practices • Upscale community involvement in data generation through community mapping and validation exercises (View Highlight)
• Technical expertise & skills • A playbook of principles and case studies that showcase good practice • Support regional centres of expertise (View Highlight)
• Disasters: Natural hazards that can lead to humanitarian situations include floods, storm surges, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, wildfires, and extreme temperatures. These events can lead to a humanitarian crisis if they restrict a large group of people from accessing fundamental needs, such as food, clean water, or safe shelter. Floodingrelated disasters are the most commonly reported and/or recorded.6
  Security and conflict: When the protection of the territorial integrity, stability, and vital interests of states through the use of political, legal, or coercive instruments at the state or international level fails, violent conflict and insecurity result. Violent conflicts lead to death and destruction, the crumbling of weak states, local and international insecurity, a vicious cycle of underdevelopment, instability, and large-scale humanitarian crises.7
  Food insecurity: Food security means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life. Natural hazards, conflict, and supply chain inefficiencies can disrupt access and contribute to food insecurity. Existing food insecurity is often exacerbated by conflict that displaces communities that are unable to carry out day-to-day activities, such as managing crop fields.
  Population displacement: At the end of 2020, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated global displacement surpassed 80 million people.8 Refugees are people who have fled war, violence, conflict, or persecution and have crossed an international border to find safety in another country.9 An estimated 26 million people are refugees, 68% of whom are from Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. Further, 39% of refugees are hosted in five countries: Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, and Germany.10
  Internally displaced persons
  (IDPs) are those forced to flee their homes, but stay within their own country. IDPs also include people displaced by internal strife and natural disasters. Over 46 million people are estimated to be IDPs.11
  Health emergencies: Public health emergencies include significant outbreaks of infectious diseases; epidemics, in which a disease affects a large number of people within a community, population, or region; and pandemics, when an epidemic spreads over multiple countries or continents (e.g., COVID-19).12 (View Highlight)
• Permanent hazards, for the purposes of risk management, are always present (e.g., coastal erosion and climate change).
  • Temporary hazards can be long-duration (e.g., slow onset) but have a clear start and end point (e.g., drought).
  • Episodic hazards tend to be shorter in duration but recurring (e.g., hurricanes, winter storms, tsunamis, and river floods). (View Highlight)
• The World Bank’s Data for Better Lives highlights how the production and collection of data enables humanitarian and development outcomes. Individuals, civil society, and academia gain greater accountability and government and international organisations improve policymaking and service delivery, whilst the private sector gain increased business opportunities. However, these positive outcomes come with the risks of greater criminal activity, political surveillance, market concentration, widening inequality, and discrimination. (View Highlight)
• In other cases, satellite applications may offer data that is more frequent, more detailed, and more affordable than groundbased data sources, such as traditional maps, census data, bespoke surveys, ground teams, or even innovative methods like the use of drones. (View Highlight)
• Data from satellite applications has the specific advantages of:
  • Coverage: Satellites have global coverage that makes it possible to consistently monitor vast, remote, and even conflict regions across countries and continents.
  • Objectivity: Satellite observations derive from the satellite instrument’s measurements, which have a known and controlled range of error and are thus less susceptible to many of the biases detected in other measures of the same phenomena.
  • Repeatability: Satellite observations are collected along a periodic orbit of the Earth’s surface, so they are repeatable and comparable over time.
  • Continuity: The continuity of satellite data streams allows time to build experience and refine the systems that use the data.
  • Thematic detail: The range of satellite sensors now available allows for application to a wide range of humanitarian domains.
  • Analysis-ready data: Satellite data is organised and processed according to defined industry standards and provided in forms that allow immediate further analysis.
  • Speed: Increasingly, satellite data is available for use soon (days or even hours) after it is acquired, enabling stakeholders to receive the derived information they need to act quickly—critical in, for example, disaster scenarios.
  • Affordability: Along with the increase in commercial satellites, there is also an increase in satellites that allow free and open access to data, such as the Copernicus Sentinel missions. (View Highlight)
• Supply-side organisations include: − Private suppliers: satellite operators and resellers, cloud computing providers, platform/solution providers, hardware/software suppliers
  − Public suppliers: satellite operators, analytics providers − Academia − NGOs − Media − Development Agencies
  • Demand-side organisations include: − Governments − First Responders − Private Sector − Academia − NGOs − Media − Development Agencies − Affected Public (View Highlight)
• Supply-side actors
  Private Suppliers and Public Suppliers represent the majority of providers of satellite applications for humanitarian emergencies.
  Private Suppliers are a diverse group that is further subdivided. Satellite Operators and Resellers, such as Inmarsat (SatComms) and Maxar (EO), own and operate satellites and sell data streams from them, either directly or via resellers. Cloud Computing Providers, such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, make it possible to process this data into products by providing on-demand cloud infrastructure. This software as a service and infrastructure enables all data analysis and product generation to be implemented in the cloud instead of the user’s desktop.31
  Google Earth Engine (GEE), a cloud-based platform, combines a multipetabyte catalogue of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities needed to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth’s surface. GEE is open access and allows users to conduct analyses that would otherwise require enormous resources to access, download, store, and analyse.32 Platform/Solution Providers, such as Descartes Labs, build satellite applications that address specific humanitarian use cases. Examples of Hardware/Software Suppliers include Garmin GPS for navigation and companies that build large commercial geosynchronous satellite platforms, e.g., Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defence and Space. Other Private Suppliers include miscellaneous private companies in areas such as agri-business, insurance, mobile operators, and drone operators.
  Public Suppliers include two subgroups: first, Satellite Operators, which includes government space agencies such as the European Space Agency (on behalf of the European Commission) with their Copernicus constellation and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Second, Analytics Providers, such as mapping agencies, statistical bureaus, land ministries, health ministries, defence and intelligence agencies, and disaster response agencies use satellite data alongside other data sources to create and contribute analyses and reports.
  Academia and NGOs play roles on the supply-side as data providers and on the demand-side as users. Academic institutions lead the development of methods required to extract satellite data to develop products and often make these publicly available for further use. NGOs rely on insights from this data and play a critical role in collecting on-the-ground data often needed for training, contextualising, and validating satellite products.
  Media often source and use satellite imagery in news articles to raise awareness among the public about humanitarian emergencies.
  Development Agencies are occasionally on the supply-side, such as the World Bank or other International Financial Institutions (IFIs), and have internal specialist teams able to produce satellite applications for humanitarian contexts. (View Highlight)
• (View Highlight)
• Demand-side actors
  The diverse community of “data providers” is met by an even more diverse community of global humanitarian data users. Many of these humanitarian actors focus on specific domains or event types, as discussed in the previous chapter, while others are better categorised by their roles and workflows during an event.
  Government includes senior members of government, such as ministers and national coordinators, e.g., Pacific Community (SPC) and US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). They liaise with other government agencies and lead teams overseeing analysts and first responders. They engage with the public by directly briefing the media and public. They also coordinate funding requests from Development Agency(s). Government also includes mapping agencies, e.g., UK Ordnance Survey or Survey of India, and defence and intelligence, e.g., Ministries of Defence. They provide other parts of government with analysis to support decisionmaking. They also produce detailed reports for media briefings.
  First Responders include emergency services, military response units, and in-country aid agencies. They provide support in terms of evacuations, search and rescue, and emergency food, shelter, and medical supplies.
  Development Agencies include bilateral and multilateral donors, IFIs, private foundations, and corporate philanthropies. They provide funding and assistance to governments, NGOs, and the private sector.
  Media include local and international journalists. They report on the humanitarian emergency to the broader public.
  Private Sector includes insurance and reinsurance firms that provide cover against asset losses, e.g., infrastructure, vehicles, or crops, in the event of a humanitarian emergency, e.g., a disaster. It also includes multinational companies like Coca-Cola and Nestlé that have supply chains across the world, which are affected by humanitarian events.
  Academia plays roles on both the supply-side as data providers and also as demand-side users.
  NGOs include local and international NGOs and human rights organisations. They often provide on-the-ground support in the case of humanitarian events, including providing basic needs such as shelter, water, and healthcare.
  Affected Public includes affected communities who play a role in working with humanitarian stakeholders, especially those on the front lines, to direct and prioritise assistance.
  General Public includes the local and international public. They are government constituents and influencers, and in some cases contribute to philanthropic funding appeals to support NGOs in their humanitarian response. (View Highlight)
• Policy and regulation includes satellite-specific policies and regulations as well as those covering related topics, like data privacy e.g., European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), international charters (e.g., Disaster Charter), cybersecurity, data hosting, etc.
  • Education and skills encompasses the general awareness, domain expertise, and technical skills needed to produce or use satellite applications for humanitarian applications.
  • Finance involves the financial organisations providing funding to both supply- and demand-side organisations, and to other parts of the enabling environment, to facilitate the development and use of satellite applications.
  • Digital/IT infrastructure accounts for the associated technologies and data required to leverage satellite data streams, including but not limited to cloud computing, internet connectivity, ground stations, geospatial software, mobile applications and tools, and other data sources to enhance satellite-derived insights. (View Highlight)
• Democratisation of access to data, especially for affected communities, ensures that humanitarians can better collect data, share information, and validate findings with communities on the ground. This can inform intervention priorities and locations to target resources and services. In a context of increasing social and digital inequalities, technologies run the risk of continuing to benefit more resilient and less at-risk populations. However, with intentional humanitarian data stewards—people responsible for championing improved data usage—satellites can help address digital divides during events rather than exacerbate them. For example, satellite imagery provides context and maps of every community regardless of geographic spread, size, wealth, political affiliations, or administrative boundaries. By enabling feedback loops with affected communities, humanitarians would not only ensure the right to access the data collected about these populations but also gain the best possible “groundtruth,” or confirmation of their interpretation of remotely collected data. (View Highlight)
• Monitoring and evaluation of the efficacy of interventions is another key use for satellite applications. Government and UN coordinators need more oversight information, while NGOs and other demand-side organisations require specific information to design and implement their programmes. Given their revisit rates and ongoing data streams, satellites are an important source for monitoring and evaluating humanitarian programmes. During a conflict or disaster, for example, satellite imagery can evidence which buildings and roads have been damaged, as well as which have been subsequently rebuilt. Combinations of satellite data sources like EO constellations and GNSS alongside ancillary data, such as surveys, offer even more complete monitoring and evaluation. (View Highlight)
• (View Highlight)

New highlights added January 8, 2024 at 8:47 AM

• Satellite imagery supplements conventional data—in “hard to reach areas” satellite imagery can be the only source available—to provide detailed insights on local population patterns without raising data privacy concerns or endangering staff with unknown risks. Immediate needs are quickly evidenced, and humanitarians can effectively respond and target scarce resources. Whether monitoring the growth of refugee and IDP camps or the nearby resources and host communities, satellites can reduce the need for ground-based surveys. (View Highlight)
• (View Highlight)
• Satellite EO is the gathering of information about the physical, chemical, and biological systems of the planet via remote-sensing technologies. The components of EO applications include activities for the collection, delivery, and processing of satellite imagery and data. Data is interpreted, summarised, and presented in a way that is accessible and useful to the intended audience using both Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and offline technologies. (View Highlight)
• “Basic imagery” is satellite imagery that has been acquired, downloaded, and made available with minimal processing; this includes “raw” imagery straight from the satellite and imagery that has been processed in several common ways, such as refining to give a more precise location, transforming for measurement accuracy, and correcting for various data artefacts that depend on the type of instrument or camera. These are typically referred to as level one and level two imagery products. (View Highlight)

New highlights added January 9, 2024 at 11:30 AM

• The resolution grades are listed below:
  • Very High Resolution (VHR) (<1m) • High Resolution (HR) (1m–4m) • Medium Resolution (MR) (5m–25m) • Low Resolution (LR) (25m–60m) • Very Low Resolution (VLR) (>60m)
  VHR data is more expensive than lower resolution data, as it is sourced from Private Suppliers at commercial costs. Moreover, VHR data is also computationally more expensive. Lower resolution imagery, such as 10 metres to 200 metres, is available from Public Suppliers at low or no cost. (View Highlight)
• Coverage is a broad term that describes the amount of imagery and data collected over an area or region with a given frequency. (View Highlight)
• The core delivery modes for satellite imagery are direct reception, tasked and repeat imagery, archive imagery, and platform and cloud services, as detailed below.
  Direct reception – In direct reception, a customer or partner receives imagery in near real-time within their ground station footprint or by downloading pre-acquired stored imagery. Direct reception within the field of view of a satellite overpass is the quickest way to receive satellite data with latency of seconds and minutes. Direct reception requires a ground station facility with capital outlay and ongoing maintenance for large capital items, such as a satellite dish and reception equipment. Commercial suppliers will typically supply licensed ground station equipment and software to facilitate reception, simplifying implementation but at additional cost.
  48
  Tasked and repeat imagery – Tasked imagery is the requesting of single or multiple satellite images in the future. Procurers of these services typically specify a geographical area (Area of Interest (AOI)), timeframe, and frequency of observations for imagery. Cloud-free or low-cloud imagery may only be possible by preparing a mosaic of a number of images acquired over a period of time. Imagery is often supplied via online systems from satellite operators, distributors, and resellers through web and API access. Satellites have capacity constraints; therefore, imagery needed for a given time and location may not always be available. For some applications and imagery types, a prior arrangement to task imagery is necessary to ensure that required imagery is collected by satellites and made available. (View Highlight)

New highlights added January 10, 2024 at 8:50 AM

• Satellite imagery commonly requires processing and analysis in order to derive useful information from it. For small numbers of images, this can often be performed on workstations with freely available software. However, satellite imagery data tends to require significant storage and computing power to routinely process and analyse large datasets. (View Highlight)
• Machine learning (ML) is proving an increasingly important area for satellite applications81 due to its ability to process large imagery datasets more rapidly
  with a variety of learning algorithms in combination with changes in the affordability of highly parallel processing technology. Several initiatives exist to provide access to necessary tools and training data, notably Radiant Earth Foundation. (View Highlight)
• Cloud services with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) make large imagery archives available within a cloud environment (storage) and provide the IT infrastructure to run and host applications (computing). They also provide a wide variety of supporting software tools, such as popular software development libraries and environments, processing tools and algorithms, ML tools, and databases and hardware (e.g., AI accelerators and sensors). Cloud services can provide quick access to infrastructure that can be complex to independently develop and maintain but still requires skills and expertise. Many cloud services make satellite imagery available alongside tool sets as a standard service; examples include AWS,90
  Planetary Computer,91 and IBM Agriculture.92 What sets this model apart from “archive imagery” is the range of additional tools, data, and services available. (View Highlight)
• Cloud providers also provide integrated ground stations, satellite operations, and data handling services, including AWS Ground Station93
  and Azure Orbital.94 (View Highlight)
• PNT signals are broadcast from a GNSS from space. These signals are augmented to improve accuracy by ground stations for applications such as safety-critical aircraft systems.105
  Many operational GNSS satellite constellations now exist and are operated
  by national governments.106 These include GPS (USA), BeiDou (China), Galileo (EU), GLONASS (Russia), NavIC (India), and QZSS (Japan). (View Highlight)

New highlights added January 14, 2024 at 7:16 PM

• Sharing the Land (View Highlight)
  • Note: Add to contact list
• Commercial and national satellite operators provide global connectivity from telecommunications satellites. These satellites communicate with ground facilities, called “teleports,” to make additional connections to terrestrial communications networks, such as the public internet or telephone networks. Teleports are broadly globally distributed, although with higher concentrations in areas of high connectivity demand and economic activity. (View Highlight)

New highlights added January 15, 2024 at 7:50 AM

• Communication satellites can receive transmissions from and connect to these devices; remote IoT devices can connect to the internet directly via satellite. Connected sensors include water-level gauges, air pollution sensors, container-borne GPS trackers, and temperature/humidity sensors in food storage. (View Highlight)
• Figure 20 shows that satellite applications are predominantly provided by Private Suppliers to Government (42%) and NGOs (16%). This structure causes a barrier to adoption in that Private Suppliers have very different missions, cultures, and processes compared to their Government and NGO customers (View Highlight)
• Examples of potential interventions include continuing to document existing examples and case studies, and sharing such information via an online knowledge base and virtual and real-world knowledge events. Future interventions should seek to go beyond individual initiatives in order to compile a more holistic landscape of case studies. (View Highlight)
• David Garcia, a volunteer at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team, highlights that care should be taken to not separate the social and technical aspects of geospatial analysis, to ensure the trust of communities, their leaders, and local governments, whilst also being technically astute to conduct the technical analysis. (View Highlight)
• For satellite applications to have value, they need significant data from terrestrial sources to be combined. For example, in assessment of damaged buildings, satellite data will not highlight how many people were inside the building. For flooding applications, population datasets need to be combined to forecast how many people are affected by the flood. (View Highlight)
• However, barriers exist in national regulation influenced by multiple policy areas, including defence and security, industrial policy, economic development, ICT and geospatial data, innovation, and international cooperation. (View Highlight)
• A recent example of national law reducing barriers is India’s February 2021 geospatial guidelines, which removed the need for licences and approvals for Indian organisations to create and publish geospatial data (with sensitive exceptions).147
  Indian entities are
  now allowed to access ground stations and augmentation services for more accurate GNSS real-time positioning and other previously restricted public survey datasets. (View Highlight)
• All forms of satellite technology, EO, SatComms, and GNSS carry the risk of observing and conveying personal information, and thus carry privacy and ethical implications. This risk is heightened when satellite data is used in combination with other data sources that confer even more detailed information about individuals and/or households. This is increasingly the case with machine-learning based approaches, IoT technology, and other data-intensive methods that leverage satellite data alongside other disparate sources. (View Highlight)
• For example, VHR EO can produce detailed geo-referenced datasets over populations, including vulnerable communities, as well as military bases, peacekeeping operations, and critical infrastructure.156
  Having this data is essential for humanitarian missions, but can also
  be compromising for the communities and households being imaged. SatComms can relay sensitive personal information as well as key information from actors on the ground of a humanitarian event. GNSS provides location data from mobile devices which details an individual’s whereabouts. With new cloud-based GNSS, device anonymisation is not always guaranteed.157 (View Highlight)
• Informed consent is also impossible when using satellite data sources. The person or groups involved may not be aware of this invasion of privacy or, if they are aware, are unlikely to be able to mitigate it or easily take remedial action, in real time or retrospectively.158
  Rupert
  Allan, former country manager of HOT in Uganda, recommends that organisations think about who is directing and controlling the collection of data, and to what degree it is actually “accessible and accountable to and by local communities.” 159 (View Highlight)
• Machine learning is a part of many EO-based satellite applications used to process the data into information and insight. ML, both inside and outside of satellite applications, has a range of ethical risks, including automated decision-making, inherent bias, and misleading synthetic data.160
  These risks can diminish trust in ML-produced
  results and, given that much of the world’s ML talent resides in wealthier countries, algorithms are biased to reflect those cultures and societal needs. (View Highlight)
• Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Signal Code provides a human rights-based approach to information in crises; these are ethical obligations for humanitarian actors and minimum technical standards for the safe, ethical, and responsible conduct of humanitarian information activities before, during, and after a crisis.161
  Locus Charter is a proposed set of common international principles to support ethical and responsible practice when using location data (View Highlight)
• Modelling and upscaling community involvement in data generation through community mapping and validation exercises to ensure and make data open-source, available in the public space, accountable to —and also updateable by—local communities. Models like Taqadam, a for-profit company that offers a ML platform to help organisations optimise data training cycles, train refugees to annotate satellite imagery. Their annotators learn basics of data science, principles of ML, and quality control processes. While this approach does not address the open sharing of data with community stakeholders, it does involve them in key aspects of data generation and provides valuable employment opportunities. (View Highlight)
• Skills are also required by the demand-side actors (see Demand-side actors), such as an analyst in Government or a First Responder, to use satellite applications. This includes skills in model development, application operation, data interpretation, combination with other datasets, integration of ML approaches, and linkage of outputs to existing workflows. (View Highlight)
• However, there is also the need for very basic, simple-to-use tools that support humanitarian emergencies. An example of this is Field Papers, which allows maps to be printed and used rapidly in emergency contexts.163
  Many of these tools are built as open source by the open knowledge community. (View Highlight)
  • Note: Tool
• For example, Radiant Earth’s ML Hub provides such resources specifically for machine learning for EO. (View Highlight)
• Examples of potential interventions would include developing a playbook of principles and case studies that showcase good practice in using satellite technologies for humanitarian emergencies. (View Highlight)
• Satellite data can be doctored to spread misinformation, for example, with erroneous positioning, deep fake imagery, or falsified communications intercepts. In addition to intentional misinformation, there is also the potential for well-intended analysts to incorrectly interpret an image or release information that undermines the well-being of populations.173
  As technical barriers are lowered, there
  is increasing risk that SatComms can be hacked and transmitted information can be leveraged by bad actors, affecting military command systems, launch systems, communications, telemetry, and tracking.174 (View Highlight)
• Malevolent actors might use satellite applications directly against either other countries or their own citizens, for example, the use of Satellite Sentinel Project’s imagery analysis to guide combatants’ next attack on civilians.176
  The Project’s goal was to acquire and
  analyse imagery that would deter further aggression prior to the Sudan referendum. By broadcasting perceived indicators of impending aggression, SSP inserted itself directly into events and inadvertently provided valuable intelligence to bad actors, which resulted in the kidnapping and ransoming of Chinese construction workers.177 (View Highlight)
• “Vendor lock-in” can be an issue, whereby supply-side organisations build their initial EO applications on a specific cloud platform and then later face issues with switching to other providers; for example, workflows built on AWS might not necessarily run on GCP. (View Highlight)
• Many countries have invested in National Spatial Data Infrastructures to efficiently manage geographic data, metadata, users, and tools that are interactively connected.179
  However,
  the majority of these are in developed countries or multi-governmental institutions, such as the European INSPIRE Initiative, UN Spatial Data Infrastructure (UNSDI), or World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Regional Climate Centres (RCCs). (View Highlight)