The Living Rainforest are delighted to be part of ‘Our World From Space’ a two-year national STEM programme exploring the relevance of UK space science for the future health and sustainability of our home planet, funded by the UK Space Agency in partnership with the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) part of UK Research and Innovation.

Our World From Space was developed as a successor project to two of Association of Science and Discovery Centre’s longest-running programmes: Destination Space funded by the UK Space Agency, and Operation Earth, funded by NERC. Both these projects have informed the themes and approaches in Our World From Space.

Through the information and learning resources on our website aim to support the project mission ‘To inspire and empower a society that embraces the value and relevance of space science for everyday life and the sustainable future of our planet’.

Humans have been using satellites to monitor our world for decades. The first weather observing satellite systems were set up over 40 years ago, since then satellites have become useful – even essential – for many aspects of modern life, including global communications and navigation. The relevance of using satellites for environmental science, monitoring Earth’s systems, is becoming ever more critical as we see and experience the impacts of the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis. Without data collected by satellites, we wouldn’t have the same level of evidence for climate change and its impacts, and new ways of using satellite data are being discovered and developed all the time.

The key metrics for monitoring climate change are known as the Essential Climate Variables or ECVs and be grouped into 3 categories, Atmosphere, Land and Ocean.  These are observable measures of different environmental phenomena or systems, and many of them can be observed from space using satellites. Some of them can only really be measured from space.

There is an entire scientific field dedicating to understanding our world from space: Earth observation. You can learn more about some of the these essential climate variables and how they are measured in our new resources.

View our resources below