Celebrating Earth Day 2009 with Cisco and NASA’s Planetary Skin
We’ve been busy at Cisco! We’ve recently acquired both Tidal Software and Pure Digital Technologies (makers of the trendy Flip Video, popular with YouTube-rs), and announced the Industry’s first Unified Computing System, including Cisco’s foray into the server realm with new (and seriously competitively priced; sorry HP) x86-architecture blade servers, among other goodies.
Another awesome new project, christened with the biological-futurista sounding title Planetary Skin, will empower organizations and individuals with precious MRV (Measurement, Reporting, Verification) information infrastructure, allowing guidance in managing their resources, focusing on climate change-related risks, squashing pandemics, promoting biodiversity and bio-infrastructure, as outlined at the World Economic Forum last week.
Planetary Skin is “a partnership to develop an online collaborative global monitoring platform called the Planetary Skin to capture, collect, analyze and report data on environmental conditions around the world. Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement, NASA and Cisco will work together to develop the Planetary Skin as an online collaborative platform to capture and analyze data from satellite, airborne, sea- and land-based sensors across the globe. This data will be made available for the general public, governments and businesses to measure, report and verify environmental data in near-real-time to help detect and adapt to global climate change.”
The pilot for the Planetary Skin project will be mapping tropical rainforests, in efforts to prevent further deforestation, which will be prototyped over the next 12 months:
The pilot will focus on the prevention of deforestation in the tropical rainforests in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, and will explore methods for building a comprehensive sensor network, deriving and modeling information about the stocks and flows of carbon in rainforests, analyzing that information, and presenting it in a transparent and useable way for citizens, governments, and companies.
Based on the project’s success, governments may have the opportunity to intervene in future deforestation, and may also provide a basis for compensating rainforest nations for protecting this critical planetary asset. The pilot may also unlock industry and community innovation and enable more intelligent risk management. Rainforest Skin may also help create sustainable development in poorer countries, while offering the lowest-cost approach for the developed world to take early steps to protect valuable carbon sinks and tackle urgent climate change issues.
“Addressing the impacts of climate change is critical to the world’s economic and social stability,” says Cisco CEO John Chambers. “Cisco’s vision is to use information technology to transform how we manage environmental challenges. The Planetary Skin R&D collaboration with NASA will enable us to harness the power and innovation of the market for public good.”
Completely plug-and-play, Planetary Skin’s global platform hopes to ease the masses towards an exciting new route of explorative consciousness in our ever-changing virtual experience and management of mass information, as we all learn (hopefully) to adapt our lifestyles and contain our wasteful nature in order to help preserve Mother Nature.
OFFICIAL SITE: http://www.planetaryskin.org/
