Looking to space to help solve some of Earth’s most pressing problems

By creating a coalition of organizations including startups, technology providers and pioneering clients, we’re helping to crack difficult challenges across society, industry and the environment. Originating in Australia and in its first year in the UK, Gravity Challenge helps our innovators solve real-world problems in new ways – using space technologies like satellite communications, high-resolution satellite imagery, and other geospatial datasets. Space technologies offer potential for solving challenges across a variety of industries – from helping financial services organizations to better detect fraud, to enabling air ambulance crew to make more accurate decisions using satellite and mobile data.

For this round of Gravity Challenge, we’ve been focusing specifically on an issue that impacts us all – climate change. Our planet is facing a critical moment in its changing climate, and the UK government has pledged to transition towards net zero agriculture emissions by 2040, while still producing enough nutritious food to feed a growing population. It’s an ambitious target and tracking our progress against that target will require accurate measurement and monitoring of carbon consistently around the world.

One of the organizations we’re working with this year to address this challenge is Bardsley England, a fruit farming business. Given orchards are natural storage places for carbon, Bardsley want to maximise the ways in which their orchards can have a positive environmental impact. As a first step, they want to find out how much carbon is stored in their orchards. From this baseline they want to increase the carbon stored in the orchards year-on-year to be able to run carbon neutral operations and support carbon drawdown, helping in the fight against climate change. Working with Treeconomy, this collaboration seeks to combine Light Detection and Ranging data with satellite data, to allow for the remote measurement of carbon, as well as sequestration and emissions.

Given the focus of this particular challenge, the team is also being supported by our specialist Climate Change & Environment Studio within Deloitte Ventures.