The Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs) are eight environmental fields of interest, all of which relate to climate, around which the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) project is exerting its efforts. These include: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Sustainability, Disaster Resilience, Energy and Mineral Resources Management, Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture, Infrastructure and Transport Management, Public Health Surveillance, Sustainable Urban Development, and Water Resources Management around which a preliminary hierarchical vocabulary has been created.
Contents
- The GEOSS Societal Benefit Areas
- Disaster Resilience
- Health
- Energy and mineral resource management
- Water resources management
- Infrastructure and transport
- Food security and sustainable agriculture
- Biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability
- The Societal Benefit Areas and their translations
- References
One of the aims of GEOSS is to implement a proper system of Earth monitoring and to render information deriving from this process available to a global range of users. Currently, the hierarchical vocabulary structuring these societal benefit categories and their subcategories are available only in English. However, translations have been created for French, Spanish and Italian versions by Claudia Cialone and Kristin Stock of the Centre for Geospatial Science (CGS) at the University of Nottingham, UK, with input from a number of people from the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Italy, the University of Zaragoza and the European Union Joint Research Centre (JRC). Translations have also been accomplished for a Slovenian version of the SBAs by the Biotehnical faculty of the University of Ljubljana, SI.
The GEOSS Societal Benefit Areas
Listed below is a brief summary of the Societal Benefit categories and subcategories
Disaster Resilience
This Area is meant to increase the system of the Earth observation to protect human lives from natural hazards such as tsunami, sea and lake ice, floods, volcanic eruptions, wild fires etc.
Health
The Health Societal Area is meant to understand and to prevent the environmental factors related to human diseases. Some subcategories included in this, concern infectious diseases, respiratory problems, environmental stress, accidental death and injury and so forth.
Energy and mineral resource management
This Societal Benefit Area is concerned with the preservation and the operations related to energetic sources, and their renewability. Some examples of subcategories for this field are: oil & gas exploration, refining and transport operations, renewable energy operations, global energy management etc.
Water resources management
The Water topic is inherent to hydrological research, evaluation and management and the impact of humans on the water cycle. The area includes subfields of interest such as global biogeochemistry, fisheries and habitat, telecommunication and navigation, predictions etc.
Infrastructure and transport
This category provides information for Earth observations support for planning, monitoring and management of infrastructure (dams, roads, rail, ports and pipelines) and transportation (air, land and sea).
Food security and sustainable agriculture
This field of concern embraces all those agricultural activities, or related subjects such as grazing systems, the economic trade of agricultural products, for monitoring the global condition of food including the prevention of desertification.
Biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability
This area is meant to disseminate information related to the investigation on the genetic diversity of species and more generally on the natural resources of the different ecosystems and the services available for their conservation.
The Societal Benefit Areas and their translations
Note that the following table is a temporary translation. Anyone with a particular expertise in environmental and/or natural sciences can contribute with further (verified and checked) corrections of the versions already listed below.