The 44th IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium – IEEE IGARSS 2024 was held in Athens at 7-12/7/2024. It is the leading meeting of more than 2.500 esteemed scientists and professionals in the Remote Sensing field worldwide. Under this year’s theme “Acting for Sustainability and Resilience”, the symposium emphasized on sustainable development in accordance with the goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, including scientific publications, lectures, presentations and intriguing forums, specializing in Remote Sensing.
APCG team members be presented with interesting presentations and posters and was actively involved in the summer school.
Eleni Athanasopoulou presented a work inspired by the (Euro)GEO projects SMURBS and e-shape.
This work exemplifies how high-quality, high-resolution data from Earth Observation can support the localization of monitoring air pollution at the urban scale, towards reaching UN SDG 11.
Danai-Eleni Michailidou attended the conference, participating with the poster “An SDG tale of urban and forest sustainability told by Earth Observation”.
The poster showcases the added value of Earth observation (EO) as a key data source for the operational use in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework. The study is contributing towards this direction by estimating SDG 11.3.1 (“ratio of land consumption rate to population growth rate”) and SDG 15.1.1 (“forest area as a proportion of total land area”) using EO within the JustRedi project frame, which aspires to document the status of green and digital transition in Greece. The results of this case-study prove that EO facilitates the identification of local conditions shaping national trends and the design of effective regional development planning and policies.
Our esteemed colleague, Iphigenia Keramitsoglou (IAASARS) presented the collaborative work: “A service suite for identifying hot spots of air pollution, urban heat, and lack of green spaces to achieve SDGs in urban environmental management”, under the frame of ARSINOE project. APCG team contributes to this endeavor with the assessment of air quality, accessibility to green spaces, and NbS design and performance. The oral presentation was introduced during the session: Addressing Urbanites' Wellbeing in a Holistic Manner within the SDGs' Frame I and outlines a novel strategy for addressing environmental problems using an extensive service portfolio. By combining satellite data, advanced climate models, and geographic analysis, it can identify environmental hotspots, where air quality needs to be improved, temperature extremes must lessen, and access to green spaces should be increased. Our creative, integrated approach combines a variety of datasets with a range of different modeling approaches, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for inclusive solutions.