Next-Generation Digital Ecosystem for Climate Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery: A Review of Digital Data Collection Technologies

Climate change has been called “the defining challenge of our age” and yet the global community lacks adequate information to understand whether actions to address it are succeeding or failing to mitigate it. The emergence of technologies such as earth observation (EO) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) promises to provide new advances in data collection for monitoring climate change mitigation, particularly where traditional means of data exploration and analysis, such as government-led statistical census efforts, are costly and time consuming. In this review article, we examine the extent to which digital data technologies, such as EO (e.g., remote sensing satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, generally from space) and IoT (e.g., smart meters, sensors, and actuators, generally from the ground) can address existing gaps that impede efforts to evaluate progress toward global climate change mitigation. We argue that there is underexplored potential for EO and IoT to advance large-scale data generation that can be translated to improve climate change data collection. Finally, we discuss how a system employing digital data collection technologies could leverage advances in distributed ledger technologies to address concerns of transparency, privacy, and data governance.