Environmental Justice During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Challenge

The purpose of this challenge is to use remote-sensing data and satellite images to help form a better understanding of societal trends as affected by COVID-19. Your challenge is to discern how human activity in communities of minority, low-income, tribal, and indigenous populations have changed as a result of COVID-19.

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic is currently bringing unprecedented impact to every aspect of human life, from an individual level to local community, city, county, state, country, and global scales. Governments have imposed restrictions on human activity to help minimize the spread of the virus. The severity and level of enforcement of these restrictions has varied from city to city and country to country and range from no significant change in activities to voluntary social distancing all the way to full lockdown situations where entire populations are banned from leaving their homes.

The EO Dashboard provides COVID-19 Slowdown Proxy Maps (SPM) and COVID-19 Recovery Proxy Maps (RPM) for 100 cities around the world utilizing ESA Sentinel-1 and JAXA ALOS-2 imagery to detect changes in human activity associated with COVID-19 closures/slowdown, as well as to track changes in human activity as economic activity begins to resume. The SPM/RPM products utilize SAR changes in coherency as proxies to human activity (i.e., cars changing in parking lots versus empty/parked cars, and/or new construction versus unchanged land surface).

Objectives

Your challenge is to use publicly available remote sensing data and satellite images to discern how human activity in communities of minority, low-income, tribal, and indigenous populations have changed as a result of COVID-19 using time series. Additionally, how can you analyze key differences between regions, countries, and/or states as a result of their specific restrictions (or lack thereof)?

The purpose of this challenge is to help form a better understanding of societal trends as affected by COVID-19. Deeper analysis of information gathered by satellite imagery and proxy maps (referenced above) could provide tangible evidence of changing human behavior across major urban environments, among cities, countries, or globally. For example, the SPM/RPM products have sufficient resolution to track changes in parking lots at shopping centers where businesses that were closed during the pandemic saw few cars parked outside, whereas grocery stores only saw a minor decrease in parking trends.

Potential Considerations

  • Societal trend analysis
  • Link to other Dashboard observations
  • On the Dashboard site: parking trends, air pollutant levels, food production trends

For data and resources related to this challenge, refer to the Resources tab at the top of the page.

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