By Nadia Khan
30 October 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: Since its creation in 2005, Google Earth, a downloadable program from Google that allows the users to ‘fly’ from one spot on the planet to another via digital satellite images and video, has reached nearly 400 million users internationally.
In September of 2006, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) paired up with Google to release an added ‘layer’ to the Google Earth software: UNEP Atlas of Our Changing Environment.
This UNEP addition identifies global ‘hotspots’ for climate change, highlighting regions and locations across the world impacted by climate change.
“UNEP created for each of the [original] 120 sites overlays, historic imagery overlays, of that site on earth 30 years ago and we provided the imagery from today,” explained Rebecca Moore, the Google Earth Outreach Manager who worked with UNEP on their layer, to MediaGlobal.
Photo: Greenpeace
This feature gives the users the unique opportunity to visualize the specific changes, and the magnitude of these changes, on individual locations over the course of 30 years: a relatively short time span for environmental change.
“By sliding, what we call the transparency slider, they can slide away the historic view and bring into focus what its like today and immediately you can see the glaciers have receded, the ice caps have melted, the snows of Kilimanjaro have almost vanished, the rainforest has been clear cut,” described Moore.
This kind of visualization is a commanding technique at illustrating the different types of climate change that are spoken about everyday such as, desertification, receding ice caps, deforestation and urbanization.
“It’s one thing to read about the Larson ice shelf falling into the sea from Antarctica; its another to see it with your own eyes,” said Moore.
Over the past two years, UNEP has made a consistent effort to expand on the original 120 hotspots, to over 180 today.
“UNEP has immediate plans to develop a National Atlas for Kenya and Regional Atlases for Latin America and the Carribean region and West Asia,” Dr. Ashbindu Singh, Regional Coordinator UNEP Division of Early Warning and Assessment for North America, told MediaGlobal.
“[UNEP] has been a very active partner in the sense of updating their layer, they’re getting a lot of good attention as a result of it and so they continue to actively enhance it,” Moore said.
At the time of the initial release of UNEP’s layer, Google Earth had 200 million users. Today, Google Earth is available in nearly 30 languages and countries across the world and is reaching 400 million people worldwide, with more than half of these users outside of the United States.
By reaching an audience of this scale and diversity, UNEP has created a one-of-a-kind tool to educate the world on their changing environment.
“This content is available to anyone else to look at and to study and to adapt, so that’s a wonderful thing because the UNEP layer was one of the first really powerful environmental layers,” Moore said.
In addition, “all the materials, including PowerPoint presentations, are made available, free of charge through our website [as teaching tools],” Dr. Singh added.
“We think UNEP’s work really demonstrates best practices in a way to use Google Earth as a tool for raising awareness about issues in the context of the real earth,” said Moore. “We think they have done an excellent job.”