Think globally, act digitally

Timothy Foresman (left) and John Rae-Grant have impressive qualifications for their task ahead. Picture / Richard Robinson

John Rae-Grant and Tim Foresman are two big-thinking Americans.

They talk about serious stuff like saving the planet, global collaboration and worldwide interconnectivity. They have impressive CVs and lofty job titles.

Dr Foresman is a former senior Nasa scientist and a past director of the UN Environmental Programme's Division of Environmental Information, Assessment and Early Warning.

These days he is president of the International Centre for Remote Sensing Education, a role in which he recently presented a paper on lessons from the Boxing Day tsunami to President George W. Bush.

Rae-Grant spent 10 years at Microsoft before turning consultant, strategist and director of visionary organisations.

The pair flew into town last week to drum up interest in a conference for other big thinkers: the Digital Earth06 Summit on Sustainability, at Auckland in April.

What is Digital Earth? It's hundreds of scientists working together to develop a real-time 3D geo-visualisation of our planet.

Think Google Earth, weather forecasting, The Sims and much more all rolled together in the interests of global sustainability.

Is the idea so grand it's scary? Foresman, who led the Digital Earth programme at Nasa during the 1990s, says no. It is simply about creating computer models that will explain how the Earth works so we can make it better.

"When we look around at the over-fishing, loss of forestry, ozone issues, climate change, we realise there probably are some issues out there and we probably should be thinking about them," he says.

The concept must have scared Bush, however. He cancelled its funding. But Digital Earth survived and is now administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"The goal is to model what's going on on Earth and to have that be our collective conscience," explains Rae-Grant.

He is chief operating officer of ManyOne Networks, a nonprofit organisation behind Digital Earth's technology platform.

Think of the benefits of having a snowballing database leading to the development of an interactive model of Auckland, the pair suggest. As more data is added, the model would become an increasingly useful public tool.

"At a very pragmatic level, this will allow communities to take charge of their communities and deal with the mundane issues of stormwater, trash collection, graffiti - whatever the community's priorities are," Foresman says.

How easy is it to model a city?

"Videogame designers do it all the time," Rae-Grant says. "It's a bit more difficult to have a shared model, but again videogame designers do it all the time."

Using technology developed for games and applying it to serious issues will make people take note, the pair say.

"Once you start to measure something and put it in front of people and say, here is the true extent of deforestation in the Amazon, here is the true extent of measured climate change in predictive models ... then you allow people to talk about that and contribute their stories to it and add their pieces to it," Rae-Grant says.

"Something like this can proliferate incredibly quickly, but you don't have to have very much there for it to be extremely useful."

Foresman and Rae-Grant spread their message at a Town Hall cocktail function last week hosted by Auckland Mayor Dick Hubbard. They aim to attract between 500 and 700 of the world's leading geospatial thinkers to the summit.

Digital Earth has been labelled humankind's next major scientific challenge, after the mapping of the human genome.

"They [the DNA mapping scientists] had it a little easier," Foresman crows. "The world is bigger."