The Energy Mix is partnering with mapmakers and visual storytelling specialists at North Arrow to unveil a series of interactive maps that explore the causes and impacts of climate change, enriched with expert insights.

Mapping experts at Esri have built a powerful tool in the global fight against climate change—the Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer app, which lets users visualize how landscapes have evolved to understand the deep changes reshaping our planet.

Using the bird’s-eye view that the app’s satellite images provide, conservation groups can see if tree cover has receded around, say, a coal mine in Alberta, or whether one of the province’s fastest growing cities, Calgary, is developing housing at the cost of nearby wetlands.

Offering fresh perspectives on climate action, the Land Cover Explorer—released to the public in August 2023—allows users to analyze land use and land- over data for the entire planet over the last seven years.

Mapping expert Charles Grosperrin, our blogging partner at North Arrow, used the app to track the expansion of large-scale fossil fuel extraction projects worldwide.

“Unsurprisingly, and despite the urgent climate imperative to end extraction, some of the biggest open coal mines out there are still expanding,” Grosperrin writes, adding that the Vista Mine in Alberta saw a 20% increase in range land cover between 2018 and 2023.

Conservation groups are concerned that the mine’s operators are proceeding with an underground test site without all the required permits, reports CBC News. Further expansion is also being planned, which would make it the largest thermal coal mine in North America.

From Data Availability to Accessibility

To provide such clear pictures of landscape change, the Land Cover Explorer app aggregates two sets of geospatial data: First, comprehensive land cover data, derived from the Sentinel-2 satellite with the help of AI, offers a pixel-by-pixel classification of land into nine main types, including water, ice, built-up areas, forests, and cropland. This allows users to compare changes over time, measuring shifts in land cover for any chosen area.

Then the Explorer uses access to the Sentinel-2 source imagery itself to interrogate and validate changes observed in the land cover.

At the heart of this free resource is a mission of data democratization, writes Grosperrin.

Robert Waterman, who has led satellite imagery efforts at Esri for nearly a decade, emphasized the importance of making data accessible as well as available.

“Availability doesn’t mean accessibility,” Waterman told Grosperrin. “Up until recently, this kind of data was only accessible to those with the hard skills, financial, and computing resources required to process it.”

The Land Cover Explorer seeks to lower these barriers, empowering activists, governments, and everyday citizens to engage with vital environmental data, Waterman said.

Insights Within Clicks

The team behind the Land Cover Explorer is not trying to deliver a predetermined narrative, writes Grosperrin. Instead, they aim to provide a tool for discovery.

“It’s incumbent on the user to contextualize information and knowledge for decision-making,” Waterman said.

Armed with this advice, Grosperrin explored the tool further, to test some assumptions about the human impact on our planet.

“Within minutes, I was able to confirm several alarming trends between 2018 and 2023,” he writes.

One such impact was rapid urbanization posing a risk to natural habitats: Calgary saw a 5% increase in built-up areas over six years, Grosperrin found. Recently, locals have been fighting to protect surrounding wetlands from housing development, reports CBC News.

Grosperrin also used the app to visualize the Canadian Columbia Glacier and Silverthrone Caldera, which lost 8% and 6% of their snow and ice cover, respectively. He saw pictures depicting rampant deforestation in the Apui Region of the Amazon rainforest, which has experienced a 6% decline in tree cover.

From Access to Action

“With all this data at our fingertips, the question remains: What do we do with it?” Grosperrin writes. The Land Cover Explorer bridges the gap between availability and accessibility, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to action.

“These apps are a starting point—they demonstrate what’s possible,” said Waterman, adding that users can expand on the building blocks in the app to derive specific insights that facilitate decision-making.

To read more about the app, the future of satellite imagery and the role AI plays in it, and to see several more examples of Grosperrin’s findings, visit North Arrow.