Spatial Finance aka Geospatial ESG:
Measuring the environmental impact of companies from space to assess how green a company is. Sustainable investors need this information to overcome the problem of greenwashing. Here is some more information on this topic:
Wow! This is something we are pivoting into after almost a year of working with Geospatial tooling for Agriculture. We see this come up a lot - tracking and analyzing Satellite date for sustainability and to curb climate change.
Well, almost everyone are looking from a branding angle but if good things comes out of it, so be it.
We kinda invented a variation of super resolution for satellite imagery. We are still at that early stage of ML but I’m amazed by what my co-founder does in AI/ML.
Still early, lots of interesting things and finding it really hard to pick just the tiny few to focus on.
What other use cases do you see for remote sensing data, aside from agriculture and climate change tracking?
Asking because our research team (social sciences, but interdisciplinary) is developing middleware and tooling for working with publicly accessible remote sensing data in Julia.
There are quite a lot to demands from fraud and change monitoring.
For instances;
1. Govt-Private billion dollar construction mega-projects needs regular tracking of discrepencies on area of construction, excess or the lack of areas covered, etc.
2. Planning of train tracks, especially in developing countries, and the eventual tracking of it with proof of work done, etc. Drones cannot fly all the time (weather), costly area of coverage.
Commercially available data, not just from optical but SAR[a] is the other thing. SAR may in-fact be more appropriate to track, count trees etc (if the cost becomes more economical). East Asian regions uses mostly SAR to look at Palm Trees and the likes.
No, but I would like to start a startup / open source project in this area. I maintain the website OpenSustain.tech and through it I came in contact with various projects that are being created in this area. I think UK is a good location for a startup in this field. There are a lot of investors here and a lot of funding for sustainable projects.
Very cool. Do you mind if I send you an email at team@protontypes.eu? We have an on-going (academic) research effort that may fit the criteria on your contribution guide : )
Interesting! 2 Years ago I was reading that there is exponential growth in remote sensory data (drones and satellite due to CubeSat and decreasing cost in lunching material into space.)
Do you see growth in that area or where would you get more information about it?
Ever heard of an investment thesis or focus? You don't have to be an altruist to realize that massive investments and huge markets are being made in sustainability. How many pledged net zero companies are there? How many governments have committed billions?
Carbon markets are booming, for one, and there aren't enough effective projects to accept the money.
This seems to be build on the (IMHO wrong) premise that non-investing it will somehow change the minds of these non-sustainable businesses, where in reality, by investing into a business, you get voting rights to actually influence in which direction a business is heading.
Thinking about it the other way: By not investing is such non-sustainable companies, only the people who don't care will do. And they will actually get the companies are a discount.
> by investing into a business, you get voting rights to actually influence in which direction a business is heading.
Or you just get entangled in the political battles already happening in that company, which will take more effort and time to untangle to enable you to actually steer the ship into some kind of sustainable business.
So not only you'll be fighting the lack of a sustainability mindset/processes but all the entrenched political powers that made this mindset be realised. Throwing good money at bad stuff is not really a good prospect for investing, better to invest in places that aren't dirty from the get-go.
But the companies who actually do good stuff need money and I'd rather give it to them than the others.
I also think that investing in these companies will rather change you than you will change them.
[1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/Geospatia...
[2] https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/spatial-finance-initiative/
[3] https://www.oxfordeo.com/post/near-real-time-water-stress