Our approach with Vana is evidence-based. As such, we and our steering board have identified a number of research areas that will contribute to our strategy as our climate emergency evolves. If you would like to collaborate on one of these workstreams or have ideas for joint collaborations please get in touch.
Project: Exploring Use of Satellite Imagery to Inform and Influence Corporate Land Use
Our Partners:
South West Centre of Excellence for Satellite Applications (SWCoESA)
Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI) satellite data program
Academic partner: TBC
Overview
As a platform that tracks the relationships between legal entities and their behaviours with access to data, we aim to aggregate everything that a company officer might need in order to make the business case for proactive use of their assets in tackling climate change. A picture paints a thousand words. We would like to pilot the use of satellite images and associated multispectral data in helping officers make the business case to their boards/shareholders/stakeholders.
Companies need to be able to easily report on their scope 1 (inter-organisation, inter-group), scope 2 (utility suppliers, fleet) and scope 3 (supply chain) carbon emissions. By combining Land Registry data with available analysis of land assets for each of those groupings, we make it far easier to see where action can be taken.
For this project we will be working with one landowner with disparate land holdings, and exploring what data can be discerned (vegetation levels, quality, CH4, CO2, N2O, HFCs, PFCs, SF6) and the associated resolution of the datasets.
We would also like to enable benchmarking of emissions annually, quarterly or monthly.
We intend to begin by exploring the use of high resolution, SkySat data from Planet which may allow the detection of fairly young trees and provides a differentiator from the coarser-resolution Sentinel-2 data. Furthermore, we seek to determine whether the data from the GHGSat constellation is suitable for our initial requirements in monitoring CH4.
We would also explore pricing so that we can package up the offering with our other services.
The proposed schedule and milestones for the project are:
- Month 1: Engage with satellite data providers to secure pricing information and, if available, test dataset over area of relevance.
- Month 2: Prepare a mockup of the updated reports using the test datasets for demonstration and evaluation.
- Month 3: Evaluate API, processing and integration needs for automating the inclusion of new data streams. Prepare a roadmap for the development of the updated system.