Space based Earth Observation is a consolidated capability providing added value to reach information superiority, which is a crucial enabler for operations in both security and defence domains.
The availability and responsiveness of satellite payloads, together with exploitation capacity, allow to plan, monitor, and inform security and humanitarian forces with performance not available with other means.
Climate Crisis
In the context of climate crisis or conflict insecurity, earth observation is a powerful tool to understand the situation in a global way. Indeed when a crisis happen, the NGO’s needs to answer quickly to provide help to the people, EO data is there a good option to provide detailed information at a large scale to identify the priorities.
Moreover EO data provide information over areas that can be difficult to access, in this way NGO’s can have an complete overview of the crisis situation, and define an organized support plan.
The analysis provided for supporting the NGO’s are different based on the type of crisis happening, few examples : for natural disasters EO will be really important to identify the scale of the damages, the changes in the landscape and located most impacted areas. Moreover EO can also be used to prevent natural disaster by analysing temporal series of the environment situation over specific areas. For security problems, the support will be for assessing the damages due to the conflict, and then provide a support to the population by identifying safer areas, what road to take etc…
Reliable and accurate information is essential to support environmental policies in identifying the issues to be addressed and monitoring their effectiveness.
SISTEMA, through its projects focuses on the automatic analysis of satellite data to provide information products and analyses for more effective disaster risk reduction, conflict prevention, and needs assessments for post-disaster response, recovery and reconstruction planning.
Civil security
It aims at ensuring the physical security of people, infrastructure, goods and services. The use of Earth observation in civilian security will address humanitarian aid, monitoring of infrastructure (e.g. pipelines, nuclear facilities) and control of illegal activities (illicit crop plantations and trafficking).
In the framework of projects like EO4Yemen and SR4C3, SISTEMA is using its own developed AI Super-Resolution and change detection algorithm to better monitor formal and informal settlements supporting different NGOs to optimize interventions in in hard-to-reach and fragile geographic areas.
Food security
Food security deals with threats posed by conflicts, climate change, natural hazards to the availability of food in fragile and poor countries. SISTEMA is active in supporting international organizations and NGOs in forecasting, analysing, assessing and mitigating the effect of human- and natural-driven events. Key factor in security applications is data fusion: in the framework of the Rapid Action on coronavirus and EO, SISTEMA has provided two services, one to analyse the impact of covid on agriculture, other to assess changes in traffic goods (ports, highways traffic). In both cases satellite data have been fused with mobile devices positioning data and with ships positioning to exploit the advantages of the different technologies into a single tool.
