Welcome

Environmental Legal Information Systems (ELIS) hosted A View from Space:  Digital Earth Applications in Environmental Resource Management, a full day workshop on January 26, 2001 at The American University’s Washington College of Law (WCL).  The goals of the workshop were to: 

• engage environmental decision makers, including attorneys, legislators, and other interested persons from government, private, and NGO entities in discussions on the characteristics and capabilities of remote sensing technologies and digital earth data;
• explore user needs for remote sensing technologies in the development and implementation of environmental laws and policies, and potential hurdles to successful implementation; and
• evaluate legal issues, including the scientific evidentiary standards, raised by novel technologies and environmental models and simulations.

Vision

Durwood Zaelke, President of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), started off the day by sharing our vision for remote sensing technologies and digital earth systems to fundamentally change the environmental decision making process.  Environmental decision makers recognize that problems are getting progressively worse, and realize that the root cause is the simple fact that the human-ecosystem interaction is not being managed to keep within ecosystem limits.  Pressure from our expanding global population and from the misuse of limited resources continually threatens to push us out of the safety of ecosystem limits and into a world of chaos.  Because the human-ecosystem interaction is managed through a legal framework, we may conclude that our environmental problems are worsening because legal pressures fail to balance competing pressures. 

Technological advancements, and their acceptance offer great hope to offset depreciation of the environment by assisting scientists, regulators, business people, and interested citizens make better decisions. Scientists continue to improve their understanding of human-ecosystem interactions, and they are better equipped to identify ecosystem limits, from local wetlands, to coastal regions, to forests, and the climate system.  Technologists are developing better tools for monitoring ecosystem interactions on an integrated scale and in real time, including through remote sensing.  These advancements provide an opportunity to visualize human-ecosystem interaction through the simulation of possible future conditions.  We need to see the future more clearly if we are to stay within ecosystem limits.  Our challenge today is to determine the most efficient way to establish technologies and processes that will enable us to better mange critical ecosystems through the integration of digital earth science, including remote sensing data, into legal systems at all levels of resource management.  

Format

The workshop was organized into three sections:  presentations, panel discussions, and plenary.  The morning presentations provided background on remote sensing technologies and digital earth systems, and provided a legal framework for use satellite and other digital information.  The midday section was filled with two panel discussions: (1) Examples of the use of remote sensing tools in the permitting, monitoring, and enforcement of environmental laws, and some of the limitations and difficulties encountered and (2) Examples of how land managers who are using remote sensing technologies in wetland, watershed, and coastline decisions and the obstacles encountered.  The last presentation before plenary was on evidentiary issues that may be raised by the use of novel science in the courtroom and the opportunity for science to play a role in how the courts respond to the use of remote sensing and digital earth systems. Two plenary groups broke off to discuss what must be accomplished to develop specific applications for use in the legal and public policy making process for regulatory and resource management applications.  

Conclusions

Technological advancements, and their acceptance, offer great hope to counteract the depreciation of the environment by assisting scientists, regulators, businesses, agricultural interests and citizens make better decisions. There are huge opportunities to use remote sensing and digital earth systems to assist in balancing human-ecosystem interaction, but before advances can be made, there must be better communication between the information space and the user communities.  Digital applications should only be developed with clear purpose; potential legal issues related to that application should be considered in advance.  Examples of how remote sensing may be applied in a decision-making context include how to allocate nutrient loads in a watershed, identifying cause and extent of pollutant spills, protecting our fishing resources, and delineating and managing our forests and coastlines.  All these ideas are built around better communications: the data collectors need to present the data to potential users in understandable terms, while potential users must articulate clearly the problems they seek to solve.