Far from painting a picture of doom, speakers at the Eye on Earth Abu Dhabi 2011 Summit gave us all grounds for hope. However, the speakers at the Eye on Earth summit also reminded us of the terrible suffering that stalks the world – hunger, repression, and the destruction of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, as well as the importance of the issues under discussion at the Summit.

The United Nations’s Under-Secretary-General, Sha Zukang, understands this well the importance of the Eye on Earth Summit. “We must, as a priority, enhance the accessibility of data and information,” he said. “For policy to be based on science and facts, data and information must be widely and easily accessible. It must also be in formats usable for decision-making, and in public domains.”

Mr. Sha is overseeing the preparations for next June’s Rio+20 Summit – the global sustainability summit, sometimes billed as a second Earth Summit. For him, it is imperative to have integrated information. “The UN system has, so far, failed in producing an integrated report on global sustainable development. This must change. If we are serious about following up on Rio+20, then making integrated assessments of global sustainability, as called for by the UN General Assembly, will be indispensable. Let this Eye on Earth initiative also be an Eye on the Earth’s ecosystems, societies, and economies – in short, an Eye on the Earth’s sustainability”.

Hernando de Soto, People and Poverty Economist on the Arab Spring

The people poverty economist Hernando de Soto helps us understand life in a very different environment from rural Africa. They are the mostly urban poor of the Arab world. For De Soto, the wave of revolts that became known as the “Arab Spring” do not have their roots in politics, but in misguided government policies that thwart the poor’s entrepreneurial drive.

“Mohammed Bouazizi immolated himself because his livelihood was taken away,” De Soto said of the late 26-year old Tunisian, who on December 17 last year set himself on fire in front of a government building, an act of protest that sparked events leading to the fall of the regime of President Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali. “By confiscating his business assets – his cart and scale, his merchandise – police took away Bouazizi’s ability to feed his family, save, or repay his loans. In short, they took away his future.”

To legalise his small street-cart business, Bouazizi would have needed to take 54 different steps involving a plethora of agencies. It would have taken half a year and cost over 3,000 USD, around a year’s income. In Egypt, it takes 136 steps; in Libya, 69. “These are burdensome, discriminatory and just plain bad laws,” De Soto said.

Not surprisingly, the poor organise their lives extra legally. They draw up quasi-legal documents to assert title to land, conclude a contract, or access a loan. De Soto estimates that the value of extralegal businesses and property in Cairo is 30 times bigger than the value of the companies quoted on the Cairo stock exchange. But the news is encouraging. De Soto sees signs that bringing secure rights to the poor will be the primary priority of the new regimes ushered in in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt.

Chief Surui Speakes about protecting his Brazillian rainforest people

In the southern Amazon rainforest, property is just one facet of the challenges faced by the Surui people. Their reserve is continually threatened by illegal logging, Chief Surui told delegates. Until the late seventies, the Surui fought back with bows and arrows. Now, thanks to a partnership with Google, they have a far more powerful weapon: information. Real-time satellite imagery alerts the Surui to encroaching loggers. Hand-held devices are used to record the carbon-storage capacity of the Surui’s forest, allowing them to claim carbon mitigation payments. These, in turn, are used to strengthen the Surui’s ability to protect their lands and their way of life.

As Google’s Rebecca Moore announced, the tools the Surui used to achieve this are open access tools. Google’s powerful resources are available to anyone on a web-based platform called Earth Engine. This partners with data providers around the world to bring the hugely efficient geospatial computational tools at the disposal of anyone. Already, Earth Engine is used to monitor deforestation, soil degradation, land use changes and more.

Dennis Garrity from the World Agroforesty Centre Speaks on Sustainable Agriculture

To those who think humanity is doomed to fight nasty wars to capture an ever-decreasing food supply, Dennis Garrity, director general of the World Agroforesty Centre, gave a powerful rejoinder.

Agroforestry, the practice of planting trees and food crops together in the same field, has already transformed the prospects of millions of farmers in the arid regions of Africa, China and elsewhere. The trees fertilise the soil, help retain precious moisture, and provide shade in the unrelenting sunlight. “Yields commonly double or even triple”, Garrity said, without the need for expensive fertilisers, irrigation systems or machinery.

Agroforestry does something that is perhaps even more important. It regenerates degraded land. It even turns sun-baked, rock-hard laterite back into soft, productive loam. Across Niger and beyond, a silent revolution is taking shape. Farmers adopt the method not because an aid agency tells them to do it, but because they can see with their own eyes how their neighbours benefited. And the sweetest thing? It costs literally nothing. Agroforestry needs no external inputs.

It even brings benefits to other species. Dr Jane Goodall, who shot to fame through her work with the chimpanzees of the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, became a convert in 1986. “When I first saw Gombe from a small plane, I was shattered by what I saw. I had no idea of the scale of the surrounding deforestation,” Goodall said. The ‘take care’ programme subsequently launched by Dr Goodall’s foundation has used similar agroforestry techniques. The forests around Gombe are growing back.

These examples have one thing in common: the power of understanding brought by better data. Agroforestry’s potential went unrecognised for years because those analysing the earth observation satellites pictures failed to spot the acacia trees most commonly used: these lose their leaves in the wet season.

Saving Gombe’s chimpanzees meant understanding how and where to give the human population a stake in their future. And understanding the plight of the poor in North Africa depends on a careful analysis of the distribution of extralegal property and businesses.

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