Clarity of Vision - Technology Brings Environmental Power to the People

Microsoft is embarking on a pioneering five-year alliance with the European Environment Agency to deliver real-time environmental information to more than 500 million Europeans. The planned Global Observatory for Environmental Change is ambitious — and technology will be a critical factor in creating a new resource that provides policy-makers and individuals with the information they need to make informed choices on the environment.

PORTOROŽ, Slovenia — 14 May 2008 — With 500 million stakeholders, and objectives that include helping to support sustainable development and significant and measurable improvement in the European environment, Jacqueline McGlade is a busy woman. She is executive director of the European Environment Agency (EEA), which, given its aims, is a relatively modest body with 150 staff and an annual budget of €34 million. Many would be content with the EEA's already impressive achievements, but McGlade sees that if people are to make increasingly complex environmental choices, the agency needs to engage with broader audiences.

"Our environment is of course influenced by massive global and national factors, but it is also affected by the daily actions, no matter how small, of each and every European citizen," said McGlade. "If we are to coordinate efforts to bring about real improvement, we need to find new ways to inform and involve citizens in something that is critical to our shared future."

The EEA conceived the idea of an online portal, with the working title of the Global Observatory for Environmental Change, that will gather together critical information, including European water, soil, air and ozone indicators, into one place. It will provide this information — from the global perspective to the view from the street — at levels of detail previously unseen in environmental monitoring. The Observatory will provide an easily accessible and understandable resource for governments, policy-makers and citizens to access meaningful data in real time.

Until recently the EEA had kept pace with technology to gather and share information, but the Observatory requires development of novel technologies and the adaptation of existing ones to new purposes. This is a pioneering concept that has no parallel anywhere else in the world, and so requires pioneering technology. The kind of close partnership needed to deliver the technology for the Observatory was a departure for the agency and is the first of its kind on this scale. A critical part of the EEA's ability to both gather and disseminate authoritative environmental data is its independence, and so it needs to choose its partners with care.

The EEA has been working with Microsoft since the summer of 2007. Specific needs included the seamless flow of information to and from the Observatory and the requirement that the project be non-exclusive and open to third-party developers. This last point is an important one; ensuring that the Observatory remains open and inclusive and provides freely available data that belongs to the agency.

"From the outset we saw that our concepts of environmental sustainability follow those which underpin the Observatory, recognising that responsibility is at once global, organisational and individual," said Jan Muehlfeit, chairman, Microsoft Europe. "At a business level our commitment to environmental sustainability sees us ensuring that our products are as energy-efficient as possible. But we have broader responsibilities and are constantly seeking ways in which technological innovation can help to address the complexities of environmental sustainability — an ambition that perfectly resonates with the ambitions of the Observatory."

One of the advantages of the Observatory will be its ability to show environmental information at the global, regional and local level, allowing detailed comparisons of conditions in different parts of the continent and providing graphic illustrations of how particular events affect localities. The Microsoft Virtual Earth platform is being developed to facilitate this advanced geo-spatial capability. The Observatory will be able to focus in on an oil spill, for example, showing Europeans how it spreads and contaminates the seas, or how a polluting factory is affecting air and soil quality in the surrounding areas. In being able to track and predict ozone levels, it will also allow people with breathing difficulties to understand how they will be affected in any particular place and at any particular time. People may one day consult the Observatory in much the same way as they now look at the weather forecast, but will be able to find out far more sophisticated and useful information than if it's simply going to rain.

The Observatory also has the potential to be a powerful instrument for positive change. With real-time environmental information at their fingertips, European citizens can apply pressure on governments to act quickly and responsibly when they see and more fully understand the environmental implications of harmful activities. McGlade said, "This cooperation does not only mean that we will have instantaneous access to the most up-to-date information on the environment — it will also empower us, citizens, to ask for more from decision-makers."

The democratic ambitions for the Observatory go further — using it to gather as well as disseminate information. The amount of data required to deliver the detail envisaged will need the combined monitoring capability of many millions of ordinary people. Organisations that have members regularly on the ground, ornithological and wildlife societies for example, will be able to feed in information to the portal. Consequently, the Observatory will also be able to give information on habitats, migratory patterns and whole ecosystems. "This collaboration is a first of its kind to establish a two-way communication on the environment," added McGlade. "Until now, authorities, including the EEA, have communicated their data to the public. But local observers, who are often the first to notice real change in their environment, had difficulties sharing their observations with others. This partnership will provide them a platform to do exactly that."

Microsoft is helping to develop technology capabilities that can handle potentially vast streams of complex information; address uncertainties; quality-assure data; integrate incoming data from traditional and novel sources; and present data in ways that are accessible, understandable and useful.

"No single individual, organisation or enterprise can deliver environmental sustainability," said Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist, Rob Bernard. "But every individual, organisation and enterprise, working together, can make decisions that can work towards it. The EEA's observatory puts in place an information resource that delivers detailed, accurate and up-to-date information on the environment, ultimately helping inform the decisions Europeans make. The concept and capabilities of the portal aim to set new standards in environmental reporting and responsibility — a vision that Microsoft is deeply committed to realising."

The implications of the Observatory are even now being explored and understood: it has the potential to make huge progress towards achieving the EEA's objectives to "support sustainable development and to help achieve significant and measurable improvement in Europe's environment through the provision of timely, targeted, relevant and reliable information to policy-making agents and the public." Jacqueline McGlade is excited by the scope of the project and what it can achieve. "We can only tackle climate change effectively if we truly begin to understand our patterns of living and how they affect our environment. This collaboration between Microsoft and the European Environment Agency will bring information on the environment into our daily lives. With easy access to such information, we can make well-informed decisions and help improve the environment."