Mapping the future - how satellite images can predict our new world

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now twice the size of Texas. To help combat waste filling our oceans, charity The Ocean Cleanup is partnering with organisations to harness satellite imaging technology for the detection and tracking of marine litter from space.

In other, similar applications, environmental agencies have used satellite imaging to track the affects of global warming across the planet, identifying coastlines that have receded and rivers and lakes that have dried up. The impact of deforestation in places like South America have been well documented, as have the shrinking polar ice caps.

Along with the environmental aspect, there have been plenty of commercial applications for satellite imagery, with farming giants looking at images that reveal the vegetation density and quality, with the ability to pin-point problem areas across acres of crops and address them before they affect the overall yield.

But what about the future? With the ever changing environment, the ideal location for particular crops is no longer a fixed constant. The conditions required to grow certain varieties of plants are now being seen in places previously unthinkable; award-winning sparkling wine is now being created in the English countryside where the soil and conditions are matching those of Champagne, while Greenland has seen stretches of land usually frozen year-round thaw out in the summer and become suitable for growing vegetables.

With examples of these geological changes being turned into opportunities for successful business, is there more that can be done at an earlier stage to secure the areas due to reach "ideal climate" before their value skyrockets when those conditions arrive?

Far from some cosmic game of reading tea leaves or staring into a crystal ball, the catalogue of satellite imagery could be put to use, to model the trends year-on-year of the vegetation, temperatures, rainfall and even factors like urbanisation all in order to provide informed trajectories for the next "Sussex-Sparkling", or perhaps a ski village in an area that would only be accessible if the ice-ridge cutting it off from the rest of the valley was to melt…

There are countless studies into the effects of global warming, perhaps putting the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to work in the arena of geography could not just benefit new ventures, but also keep companies and governments in check, identifying trends that could call out specific sources of pollution on an exponential trajectory and enable a more concerted, joined up approach to pressuring those responsible.

Now, I’m off to put a deposit down on land for my camel farm in the Cairngorms, opening Christmas 2045.