Satellite Imagery’s Humanitarian Applications
Satellite imagery is quickly becoming one of the most effective tools available for industry professionals around the world. Now, it is being used in a different vein by people interested in helping to save lives. The Satellite Sentinel Project, a collaborative effort between Google, the United Nations Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and celebrity-backed NGOs, is designed to help deter any violence in southern Sudan.
The need for the project came into being when the January 9th referendum in south Sudan came to light. The referendum will give people the choice to vote on whether the region should split from the rest of the nation, and given the aftermath two-decade long civil war being fought against the central government in Khartoum, many experts believe the south will vote for independence. As Richard Solash, writer for RFERL.org notes, “Less certain is whether Kartoum will accept the result and allow the birth of the world’s newest country.”The Sentinel project will use private satellites to track troop buildup or movement that could indicate impending violence. These findings will be mapped, alongside the locations of burned villages and other apparent signs of violence, which will hopefully allow a pattern to emerge that could help deter further trouble. Actor George Clooney, who spearheaded the Sentinel initiative, fittingly described the cameras as “antigenocide paparazzi” in the face of would-be offenders.
Patrick Meier, co-founder of the Crisis Mapping Project at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, believed that satellite imagery is becoming “a more open-source, open-data, very public, nonstate approach to employing and leveraging these technologies…to really monitor and do surveying and derive in some form or another some accountability.” The first high-resolution satellite for commercial purposes was only launched in 1999; since then, satellite imagery has seen a dramatic increase in usage because it provides an unobtrusive look at property, land, and – as seen with the Sentinel project – impending violence in specific areas. Six of the satellites currently hover above Earth, owned by private satellite imagery companies. UNOSAT, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and others analyze the images and make them available to NGOs and the public.
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Originally a six-month project, UNOSAT’s role concluded when the pilot phase of the program ended on June 30th, 2011. Since then, several celebrity figures and humanitarian leaders have expressed interest in re-launching the project in an effort to continue to systematically monitor and report on potential hotspots and threats to security along a border. Providing information in near real-time (with images coming within 24 – 36 hours), the project aims to continue to head off humanitarian disaster and human rights crimes before they occur.