Hsu Angel, Khoo Willie, Goyal Nihit, Wainstein Martin
Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore.
Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States.
Front Big Data. 2020 Sep 10;3:29. doi: 10.3389/fdata.2020.00029. eCollection 2020.
Climate change has been called "the defining challenge of our age" and yet the global community lacks adequate information to understand whether actions to address it are succeeding or failing to mitigate it. The emergence of technologies such as earth observation (EO) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) promises to provide new advances in data collection for monitoring climate change mitigation, particularly where traditional means of data exploration and analysis, such as government-led statistical census efforts, are costly and time consuming. In this review article, we examine the extent to which digital data technologies, such as EO (e.g., remote sensing satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, generally from space) and IoT (e.g., smart meters, sensors, and actuators, generally from the ground) can address existing gaps that impede efforts to evaluate progress toward global climate change mitigation. We argue that there is underexplored potential for EO and IoT to advance large-scale data generation that can be translated to improve climate change data collection. Finally, we discuss how a system employing digital data collection technologies could leverage advances in distributed ledger technologies to address concerns of transparency, privacy, and data governance.
气候变化被称为“我们这个时代的决定性挑战”，然而全球社会缺乏足够的信息来了解应对气候变化的行动是成功还是未能减轻其影响。地球观测（EO）和物联网（IoT）等技术的出现有望为监测气候变化缓解的数据收集带来新进展，特别是在传统的数据探索和分析手段（如政府主导的统计普查工作）成本高昂且耗时的情况下。在这篇综述文章中，我们研究了诸如地球观测（例如，遥感卫星、无人机或UAV，通常来自太空）和物联网（例如，智能电表、传感器和执行器，通常来自地面）等数字数据技术能够在多大程度上弥补现有差距，这些差距阻碍了评估全球气候变化缓解进展的努力。我们认为，地球观测和物联网在推进大规模数据生成方面具有尚未充分探索的潜力，这些数据可转化为改善气候变化数据收集。最后，我们讨论了一个采用数字数据收集技术的系统如何利用分布式账本技术的进展来解决透明度、隐私和数据治理方面的问题。
