Google at Rio+20
June 13th, 2012 | Published in Google Public Policy
Cross-posted from the Google Green Blog.
This month, heads of state, NGOs, scientists and business leaders from around the world will meet to discuss how best to reduce poverty, advance social equity and better protect the environment at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20.
As a company that believes deeply in sustainability, we wouldn’t miss this for the world. So from June 13 - 22, a group of Googlers from our Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine teams will be joining many of our partners, including Chief Almir Surui, The Jane Goodall Institute, Imazon, Aliança de Terra, Amazon Sustainable Foundation and others to show how technology can support the conference’s core themes.
We’ll be posting updates on the Google Green Blog from the conference throughout the week, but we thought we’d offer a quick preview of how we’ll be participating:
- Wednesday, June 13th - Friday, June 22nd: We invite all conference attendees to visit us at our booth in the Rio State Government Pavilion at Athletes’ Park. You’ll be able to tour the Earth and beyond in our Liquid Galaxy, an immersive Google Earth experience, and explore some of the work our partners have created using Google tools.
- Friday, June 15th: Ronaldo Barreto, Strategic Partner Manager for Latin America, will participate in Megacities Forum 2012, at a roundtable on “Future Cities and the Use of New Transport Technologies.” Ronaldo will show how tools such as Google Maps, Google Transit and Google Street View are being used to modernize Rio de Janeiro’s transportation infrastructure.
- Friday, June 15th: Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager for Google Earth Engine and Google Earth Outreach, will speak at “No Roads to a Green Economy: Mapping Earth´s roadless areas and their services,” a discussion at the European Union Pavilion about the need to promote roadless areas as a means to conserve biodiversity and secure the rights of indigenous people.
- Saturday, June 16th: Rebecca Moore will be joining Chief Almir Surui at the Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum to share the latest news regarding our ongoing partnership with the Surui tribe.
- Sunday, June 17th: We’ll be holding an SD-Learning event, “From the Ground to the Cloud: New Tools for Sustainable Development,” which will be introduced by Brazilian Senator Eduardo Braga and will feature a presentation from Imazon on their work to create a deforestation monitoring system for Brazil, powered by Google Earth Engine. (Registration has closed for this event.)
- Monday, June 18th: All visitors to Rio+20 are welcome to join our Side Event, "Tools for Data Collection and Mapping: the Ground to the Cloud Story" at the Arena de Barra. We’ll be hearing from a number of partners about they work they’re doing with Google tools. Among others, the Jane Goodall Institute and Woods Hole Research Center will share their work estimating forest biomass over Tanzania with Google Earth Engine, and Aliança da Terra will talk about how their use of Open Data Kit and Google Maps Engine has transformed their operations.
- Tuesday, June 19th: we’ll be at the U.S. Government Pavilion to participate in panel discussions and demonstrations of our work with the Governor’s Forest and Climate Taskforce.