From Sustainable Development to Coviability – The Viewpoint of Earth Observation in the Era of Big Data

Today civil society have new expectations: scientists must not only measure risks and suggest solutions of mitigation or adaptation, but they also have to monitor and report changes in order to facilitate public decision. Reporting global change nowadays is based on indicators. The main challenge is to find synthetic, and valid indicators for time and space scales relevant to challenges and to mitigation and adaptation policies. Simultaneously, Earth observation has largely evolved. The number of spatial missions has drastically increased, and today we have relatively continuous data in space and in time. This remote sensing evolution causes a shift of paradigm. The richness of data, and the fact that they now cover a wide range of resolutions and temporal frequency, make a “bottom up” approach possible, which develops from the observations to construct a stochastic approach of the environmental and social dynamics at work. This chapter will attempt to give some examples of holistic indicators of changes in the fields of global water resources and biodiversity loss, provoked by human impacts on the Amazonian agricultural frontier. These themes mobilize the concept of coviability between societies and their environment.