Drones: New tool for SDGs — bringing scale, speed and safety in the global pursuit of sustainability
Jul 5, 2023, 15:23 IST
As wildfires rage in Canada, drones with infrared imaging features have been commissioned to collect accurate data on blazing hotspots. This crucial information is helping firefighting authorities to determine the location of critical firestruck areas, and ensuring they remain fully extinguished and will not reignite.
As the battle to protect the environment heats up globally, the drone, despite being majorly touted as a military weapon in the news, continues to prove its versatility in sustainability strategies. Policymakers and big corporations across the globe are recognising the use of specialised civilian drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for environment protection.
For starters, the drones’ ability to capture photographs and videos, measure particulate matter in the air, and gather various types of other rich information makes them invaluable in any big sustainability plan. Other appropriately programmed drones can help in the large-scale planting of seeds in afforestation projects.
One of the most significant advantages of these mini copters is that they can cover a wide geographical area more efficiently and inexpensively than humans, while sending back videos and data in real time for analysis. They can also be deployed to gather information from areas too hazardous for humans, such as forest fires or offshore oil pipeline leaks.
Drones and the sensors deployed with them enable sustainability, not only by providing data which helps take timely decisions, but also helps improve biodiversity in farming practices, optimising pesticide use in agriculture, monitoring air pollutants, ensuring safe mining practices and accelerating reforestation.
These nifty gadgets also provide a platform to collect diverse data such as images, videos, thermal data and multi-spectral data, which provide many advantages over satellite imagery. The drones can be equipped with cameras that provide far higher quality thermal images, videos and still images than satellite imagery. For example, the Earth Observation Center in Bavaria, Germany is fitting commercially available drones with a range of sensors to collect environmental data about heat islands in cities, condition of forests, droughts and other data required to monitor the environment.
As agriculture and farming continue to dominate as the largest sectors globally, drones play an increasingly important role driving sustainability. Excessive use of pesticides impacts biodiversity in farms at scale. As a result, monitoring and measuring the impact becomes critical not just from an ecological ecosystem perspective, but also because lack of biodiversity affects farm yield.
Furthermore, consumer product organisations and farmers are now using drones coupled with other sensors to measure baseline biodiversity and improve the flora and fauna diversity through effective measurement of successful sustainable farming practices. The technology also helps reduce the cost of measuring biodiversity levels, which were earlier largely manual and labour intensive processes. In that regard, many farmers are incentivised to trade the credits from improving biodiversity in a marketplace to finance the benefits from using technology.
What’s especially notable is the manner in which precision agriculture has received a massive boost as data is now acquired from different optical, thermal, spectral sensors and GPS technologies. This helps drones spray pesticides, micronutrients with utmost precision in specific areas of the farms, thus reducing the extent of pesticides used, improving farm yield while reducing the cost of agriculture. Optimising the use of pesticides in farms would help reduce the leaching of chemicals in soil and water, which otherwise creates a plethora of environmental hazards.
A prime example of the advantages of this new tech can be observed in Romania, where authorities are using drones to monitor the air quality of many regions. Large product companies and government organisations are now using drones to take air samples of large areas across dairy and meat packers to effectively baseline, measure, and tax methane pollution, one of the significant sources of global warming caused primarily by livestock and dairy farms.
Meanwhile, miners in some countries are beginning to check the utility of drones first in inspections and data gathering of surface cracks, general ground conditions, erosion and water bodies even before digging starts. Once mining initiates, the drones help keep track of equipment and assess the mining’s real-time impact on nearby areas such as water bodies. Thus, they not only reduce the requirement for feet on the ground but can gather life-saving data on old mines and hazardous chemicals before workers visit potentially dangerous areas.
The advantage of scale is making drones a worthy addition to large afforestation projects. A single drone can sow far more seeds over a larger area in less time compared to manual sowing or seeder machines. Thus, the gadget will be quite handy to help reforest economically denuded regions such as deserts.
There will be more use cases for drones in sustainability as they evolve and become more sophisticated and capable. At the same time, we can also look forward to different industries and geographies as they evolve their own drone solutions.
Arun Nagarajan is a Technology Partner from EY India
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are of the author/interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of Business Insider India. The article has been partly edited for length and clarity.
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As the battle to protect the environment heats up globally, the drone, despite being majorly touted as a military weapon in the news, continues to prove its versatility in sustainability strategies. Policymakers and big corporations across the globe are recognising the use of specialised civilian drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for environment protection.
For starters, the drones’ ability to capture photographs and videos, measure particulate matter in the air, and gather various types of other rich information makes them invaluable in any big sustainability plan. Other appropriately programmed drones can help in the large-scale planting of seeds in afforestation projects.
One of the most significant advantages of these mini copters is that they can cover a wide geographical area more efficiently and inexpensively than humans, while sending back videos and data in real time for analysis. They can also be deployed to gather information from areas too hazardous for humans, such as forest fires or offshore oil pipeline leaks.
Drones and the sensors deployed with them enable sustainability, not only by providing data which helps take timely decisions, but also helps improve biodiversity in farming practices, optimising pesticide use in agriculture, monitoring air pollutants, ensuring safe mining practices and accelerating reforestation.
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As agriculture and farming continue to dominate as the largest sectors globally, drones play an increasingly important role driving sustainability. Excessive use of pesticides impacts biodiversity in farms at scale. As a result, monitoring and measuring the impact becomes critical not just from an ecological ecosystem perspective, but also because lack of biodiversity affects farm yield.
Furthermore, consumer product organisations and farmers are now using drones coupled with other sensors to measure baseline biodiversity and improve the flora and fauna diversity through effective measurement of successful sustainable farming practices. The technology also helps reduce the cost of measuring biodiversity levels, which were earlier largely manual and labour intensive processes. In that regard, many farmers are incentivised to trade the credits from improving biodiversity in a marketplace to finance the benefits from using technology.
What’s especially notable is the manner in which precision agriculture has received a massive boost as data is now acquired from different optical, thermal, spectral sensors and GPS technologies. This helps drones spray pesticides, micronutrients with utmost precision in specific areas of the farms, thus reducing the extent of pesticides used, improving farm yield while reducing the cost of agriculture. Optimising the use of pesticides in farms would help reduce the leaching of chemicals in soil and water, which otherwise creates a plethora of environmental hazards.
A prime example of the advantages of this new tech can be observed in Romania, where authorities are using drones to monitor the air quality of many regions. Large product companies and government organisations are now using drones to take air samples of large areas across dairy and meat packers to effectively baseline, measure, and tax methane pollution, one of the significant sources of global warming caused primarily by livestock and dairy farms.
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In that regard, drones have enabled collection of air samples at a large scale, reducing the cost of measuring pollution and observing compliance measures taken by large companies. Meanwhile, miners in some countries are beginning to check the utility of drones first in inspections and data gathering of surface cracks, general ground conditions, erosion and water bodies even before digging starts. Once mining initiates, the drones help keep track of equipment and assess the mining’s real-time impact on nearby areas such as water bodies. Thus, they not only reduce the requirement for feet on the ground but can gather life-saving data on old mines and hazardous chemicals before workers visit potentially dangerous areas.
The advantage of scale is making drones a worthy addition to large afforestation projects. A single drone can sow far more seeds over a larger area in less time compared to manual sowing or seeder machines. Thus, the gadget will be quite handy to help reforest economically denuded regions such as deserts.
There will be more use cases for drones in sustainability as they evolve and become more sophisticated and capable. At the same time, we can also look forward to different industries and geographies as they evolve their own drone solutions.
Arun Nagarajan is a Technology Partner from EY India
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are of the author/interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of Business Insider India. The article has been partly edited for length and clarity.
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