Environmental Insights Explorer 

Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a crucial step in fighting the climate crisis. And cities now account for more than 70 percent of global emissions. But measuring exactly which activities—whether it’s buildings, cars, or public transport—are contributing to emissions, and by how much, is complex. Without this information, cities can neither understand the challenges they face, nor the impact of their environmental policies. 

This is the problem we’re working to solve with Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE), an online platform that provides building and transportation emissions, as well as solar potential analysis to make it easier for cities to measure progress against their climate action plans. Launched in 2018 for a handful of cities around the world including Melbourne, with Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide then added in 2019, EIE has helped councils accelerate GHG reduction efforts. Today, we’ve expanded EIE data access to thousands of cities worldwide, including 100+ Australian councils. 

To scale data access to local governments, policy makers and community groups, we’re also developing partnerships with leading Australian organisations, councils, and climate change experts. This includes a new partnership with Ironbark Sustainability and Beyond Zero Emissions to make EIE transportation data available for 100+ councils in Snapshot—a free tool that calculates major sources of carbon emissions, including stationary energy, transport, waste, agriculture, and land-use change. Snapshot allows municipalities to easily compare their sources of carbon emissions. This data integration will provide updated GHG profiles and enable local government policy decision-making for more than 86 percent of the country's population to put councils on a fast track for delivering commitments, building local resilience, and ensuring economic recovery. 

Accelerated city-wide analysis 

By analysing Google’s comprehensive global mapping data together with GHG emission factors, EIE estimates city-scale building and transportation carbon emissions data with the ability to drill down into more specific data such as vehicle-kilometres travelled by mode (automobiles, public transit, biking, etc.) and the percentage of emissions generated by residential or non-residential buildings. 

The insights that EIE provides have traditionally required many months of research, and a lot of resources for cities undertaking a climate action plan. Using Google’s proprietary data coupled with machine learning capabilities, we can produce a complete survey of a city that can be assessed very quickly. In this way, EIE allows cities to leapfrog tedious and costly data collection and analysis. 

EIE transport data now available in Snapshot for 100+ councils 

The next chapter 

Over the next few months, we’ll be working together to help Australian councils learn more about data insights from EIE and expand data coverage to more councils. We hope that by making EIE data accessible to more councils across Australia, we’ll help nurture an ecosystem that can bring climate action plans to life. 

Posted by Nicole Lombardo, Partner Development Manager, Environmental Insights Explorer

Recently we’ve been seeing some really diverse uses of Google Earth by Aussies. Originally started back in 2005, Earth continues to fascinate and inspire people’s creativity more than ever and we thought we’d share a few examples that have caught our eye.

Heron Island lagoon. Image downloaded from Google Earth 13 Oct. 2010. Image date 2 Aug. 2006. Image copyright 2011 DigitalGlobe and via here.

Marine conservation and preservation
Recently, researchers in Sydney have demonstrated that Google Earth can be used as a scientific tool for discovery. Dr Elizabeth Madin and her colleagues at the University of Technology are using Google Earth satellite images to understand study vegetation patterns to learn more about how small fish and urchins hide from reef predators on Heron Island. As Madin says, "To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has used freely-available Google Earth images to identify these features, and then actually tested them on the ground to confirm that we're seeing exactly what we think we're seeing from the satellite images”. Studying reefs from Google Earth offers great perspective: scientists have even discovered new reefs in the process!

Google Earth screenshots of some of Professor Kennedy’s finds, via here.

Archaeological Innovation: Discovering treasures from the comfort of your desktop
One of the difficulties of research and discovery in the field of archaeology is the problem of access: it’s not only expensive to travel, but often politically difficult or dangerous to do so.

Professor David Kennedy from the University of Western Australia, is using Google Earth imagery to identify stone-built archaeological sites across Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Kennedy says that aerial reconnaissance is the single most powerful tool for locating and mapping archaeological sites as it can reveal sites that aren’t visible from the ground, just by observing different soil colourations or how vegetation changes. Whether it’s finding an Afghan fortress or a meteorite crater, Google Earth enables a lot of freedom to explore and discover, right from your desktop.



Understanding our own country better
Google Earth allows you to overlay photos and information to satellite pictures, too, as a way of searching and discovering new information visually. For example, Tourism Tasmania have enabled a map of Tasmania on their site using Google Earth, which allows tourists and travellers to get information on everything from visitor information centres, to car hire facilities, tours, accommodation and attractions.

Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, and 3D buildings -- and from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can create and save your own “flyovers” and map out your data. (Try it yourself here).

Google Earth isn’t just helping with new discoveries; it’s helping many scientists and non-profit organisations create powerful visualisations of the data that’s important to their cause. The visualisations they create help them collaborate better within their teams and get the word out to the public about what they’re working on.

We’d love to hear any stories you might have about using Google Earth - leave a comment below or contact us on our Twitter account at @googledownunder.

Posted by Kate Mason, Google Communications.

Posted by Rob Shilkin, Head of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs

I wanted to update you with some great policy announcements that have been keeping us busy over the past week or so.

First, Google announced our plans to go carbon neutral worldwide by the end of 2007. You can read all about the specifics here. And you can see the video of the announcement on YouTube here.

In addition to taking part in this wide ranging global effort, Google Australia has an active self-powered commuting scheme. This scheme sees our employees rewarded for travelling to work by public transport or 'self-powered' means (such as bike, skateboard or walking) with a $100 donation to their chosen charity for every 20 days of participation.

Second, we launched a worldwide public policy blog here. This will be a great way to talk about many of the incredibly important and challenging global policy issues facing the internet - including privacy, child safety, copyright and content regulation. I really want to ensure that there are contributions by Google Australia to this forum, and would love you to post comments, as these issues affect our Australian users and the Australian community.

On that note, we have joined the Australian Information Industry Association (the Australian IT industry body) and are looking forward to very close involvement in their activities. Already, our Engineering Director, Alan Noble, has spoken at their events here and here and next week is speaking here. (In between this, and writing opinion pieces, I am assured that he does occasionally find time to work on Google products).

I'll post more updates on Google Australia policy news in future.