The Eyes from Space That Help Save Earth

Over 52 degrees Celsius in New Delhi. The Indian capital is gasping for air, water is running out. This was the headline of ANSA, the Italian press agency, on 29 May 2024. It was the culmination of a succession of heat waves recorded in the previous weeks. In 2020, the American writer Kim Stanley Robinson published a novel that opens exactly like that, with a lethal heat wave hitting India, and an incipit that needs no further elaboration: “It was getting hotter”. The book is titled 'The Ministry for the Future'.

But what only a few years ago would have seemed like science fiction to most people is now really happening: reality and science fiction are getting mixed. In fact, we have known for some time that the challenge that humanity faces with respect to climate change is difficult to overcome, and that we must use all the options made available by technology and innovation on a global scale to be able to hope that we can prevail. And even if now the effects of climate change are clear to everyone, and above all increasingly extreme climate events, it has been known for quite some time that temperatures were increasing and efforts and solutions needed to be put in place. It is no coincidence that the creation of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, dates back to 1998, the year in which the WMO (the World Meteorological Organization) and UNEP (the UN Environment Program) jointly created it. Thus a quarter of a century ago. The main purpose of the IPCC is to provide regular assessments of the state of the plane; the latest report, called AR6 (Sixth Report), was published in March 2023.

When in 2007 the IPCC together with former US Vice President Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it was already churning out increasingly alarming data on the state of the climate and the mitigation and adaptation actions to be implemented. According to NOAA (the US agency that deals with oceans and the atmosphere), the month of July 2024 was not only the hottest ever, but also the 14th consecutive month to have set record temperatures. It becomes imperative to understand promptly what is happening to the Earth’s climate and this is where satellites and the space economy come to our aid. The WMO has in fact established 55 essential climate variables that need to be monitored to understand what is happening to the Earth system, and over half can be monitored in a precise, replicable, reliable and continuous way only from space. 

Understanding in order to act, this should be the motto of all of us to be able to implement those global protection and mitigation mechanisms that seem so urgent. Global challenges have to be dealt with by global approaches. But understanding is only one side of the coin, the other is to intervene at the source to reduce anthropogenic GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, and when this is not possible, develop technologies that can lead to a balanced absorption of carbon emissions, with the goal of achieving net zero by 2050. Therefore, sustainable socio-economic development can be accelerated and/or supported by the use of space technologies. And if we look at the long-term sustainability of space activities, we cannot fail to consider that as the number of satellites in orbit increases, the amount of debris also increases and space orbits start to get clogged. Therefore, we increasingly talk about space ecology and space environmentalism. As a derivation, there is work on a very recent concept, which we at the Space Economy Evolution lab (SEELab) have fully embraced: the concept of a circular space economy, which encompasses both planetary sustainability obtained thanks to space and the sustainability of the space industry.

The circular space economy is based on the concept of the circular economy on Earth, which, among other peculiarities, seeks to maximize efficiency in the use of material resources. If we go back to when this definition was coined, we can see that it was born after 2010, that is, around the same time the definition of the space economy – proposed by the OECD in 2012 – took hold. Talking about a circular space economy is instead a novelty, as the idea has only been emerging lately. If we want to save the planet, we need satellites. Increasingly, space will push us towards responsible behavior, on Earth and in space, because this is a time when reality surpasses fantasy.