Climate & ecological emergency (CEE) from global to local

David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, 1970s environmental slogan “think globally, act locally” needs to be recast ½ c. later to “think globally, observe locally” in order to better act locally: that is why I push Citizen Science  thru this blog & provide tools, say, to build your own maps here; see the banner map on the desktop not mobile blog here. 

East Anglia environment in a global context

This follows on blogposts about East Anglia in general here. It continues on Arctic peatlands news here.

The last post on infrastructure affected by sea level rise is here. Contrast below Environment England's Risk of flooding from river and from sea at left for waters coming naturalls from onshore & offsore, and my Seal level rise model by simply intersecting various sea level elevations and Ordnance Survey topogaphy (intro here and workshop here). Think of it below as fresh water largely going NE to the North Sea at left, and at right as sea water encroaching largely SW onto the land:

More maps, in 3D now

Update 3: follow on next post "Even more maps, with a twist" here.

Update 2: found a textbook example of  "carving upstream" in this gorgeous video of the Uinta Mountains of Wyoming.

Update 1: more offshore canyons crowning Antarctica found with new digital terrain data and give us a beautiful map @ bottom.

This follows on the previous map story here. The next one is here for maps & here for geomorphology. 

A conversation with AI (long read)

Update: a short read on Medium tells "the story behind the story" of American & French Revolutions.

Shakira YouTube channel posted this video #LMYNLWorldTourCDMX: 

How a confusion between CDMX (Ciudad Mexico) and MCDX (1410 in Roman numerals) lead to a far-ranging AI chat thru culture, geography, career and climate activism. MSFT Copilot (here) transcript (Italics: me, regular: Copilot):

London Thames Barrier update

Update 1: here is the transcript of Hansen's latest "in plain English" (alt. here)

Update 2: here is the Climate Cultures article this map was used in, thanks Lola Perrin.

Update 3: here at the end is the relevance of this sort of effort in a broader context

Two weeks ago I recreated Sea Level Rise (SLR) and Risk of Flooding (RoF) maps for the lower Thames River near the Thames Barrier (blog) for a WhatsApp Group considering the future of its ageing infrastructure w.r.t. recent climate extremes. This week came a global and urgent update affecting Sea Level Rise, by James Hansen who sounded the alarm ~ 35 yrs ago (go to 1981 & 1988 in Medium): a paper incl. supplementary materials "Global Warming Has Accelerated" (Columbia) c/w companion webinar (Columbia).

London Thames Barrier revisited

Update 2: see renewed Sea-level Rise extents according to new information here 

Update 1: see addition at bottom... thanks to our indefatigable London climate activists!

Further to my original blog post 3½ yrs. ago here, I was asked to share maps of the area surrounding the Thames Barrier (Wikipedia): A WhatsApp group considered the necessity for a second barrier under Climate Change that increases both flooding and sea level seasonal elevations. 

Senegal delta sea level rise map

Five friends at Arts & Metiers engineering school in Paris took a ten month leave to sail around the North Atlantic: Lez'Arts Marins (here) sail south from Britanny past the Azores & Madeira to Senegal for a moth humanitarian aid project, west across to Martinique and northeast N of Scotland to Scandinavia and back.

Cumbria classic revisited, Appleby-in-Westmoreland

Almost four years ago, a story map here showed the Skelworth Fold area of the Lake District for a friend, using advanced mapping and Environment Agency digital elevation.

Hurricanes, tornadoes and sea level rise

Update: see @ bottom example of a Cyclone (Wikipedia) as they're called in the So. Hemisphere.

 Further to our explorations in AI here and to the previous post here, this is a 'conversation' with Copilot, Microsoft Bing's AI extension. Conversation means that you can daisy-chain questions without repeating them, either to extend or to zero in:

A return to my roots

Updates: mapping climate data from historic ships & global harmonization follow respectively here & here.

 "You can get Andrew outa maps, but you can't get maps outa Andrew" quipped a GIS map friend when I left Kuwait a dozen years ago... Well after quitting socials, Esri(UK) graciously helped me recover my desktop app. While I lost my story maps and web maps content, I maintained a free dev account - story maps and maps&data - this was chiefly to preserve my Living Atlas content inspired by John Nelson. 

Cottenham Open CIC rebooted

Community Engagement  1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 & 21

Update: the next post (here) will show how a blog post on creating maps, is created by generating prompts  using Bing AI in a Udemy course on prompt engineering following STAR (style-task-audience-role).

Re-engaging après-COVID what is in LinkedIn, below & Esri Hub: Part 1 outlined Community Engagement. Part 2 built a story introducing the community. Part 3 tied together community maps and climate mapping. Part 4 introduced a process framework for this community engagement. Part 5 expanded on our aim toward a community engagement.  Part 6 added our own Wikipedia Gazetteer as we build up the local landscape. Part 7 showed a draft Press Release introducing our social enterprise. Part 8 on coastal inundation scenarios adds some parameters in the debate. Part 9 on temperature anomaly scenarios further constrains the debate. Part 10 followed up village engagement process via recent Parish Council update. Part 11 added flood risks to coastal inundation and temperature regime models. Part 12 described Cambridgeshire Parishes affected by sea level rise. And finally here we introduce AI with a local twist.

Satellite data help for local housing issue

 The #30DayMapChallenge Day 23 challenge is "GHSL data", here is the section in the story map that will chronicle the map challenge when it's finished:

Global Human Settlement  for Northstowe controversial development NW of Cambridge UK, monitoring housing probability (GHS-BUILT-S2, 2018) and housing footprint (GHSL-ESM, 2015) against Esri 2020 Land Cover map extract with OpenStreetMap detailed base-map. Various blended overlays 'bake' the layers into a screen pattern allowing to compare and contrast past built areas vs. currently probably built against submissions. 

Return East Anglia Peatlands to being carbon sinks

Community Engagement  1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 & 20

Update 7: peatlands restoration in Dartmoor here

Update 6: peatlands revisited in 2025 here

Update 5: Community Interest Company re-engagement is here

Update 4: actual Fenlanders interviewed in this fab blog post

Update 3: peatland restoration by numbers, Indonesian example

Update 2: soil degradation and climate change masterclass, TEDtalk pointers

Update: added Why we should all be obsessed with Peatlands at the end of the story map below ]

No. 20! Isn't it fitting that chronicling East Anglia challenges & opportunities w.r.t. climate emergency - risk of flooding, sea level rise,  vulnerability indices and now pandemic - uncovered the greatest opportunity yet: returning local peatlands from carbon emitters to original carbon sinks could dwarf any individual effort to mitigate CO2 emissions, currently the major driver of climate change.

Sea Level Rise Maps #reloaded

[ Update 2: at bottom is the comprehensive water web map that followed this...

Update 1: near the end of the story map, see how you can style your own DEM tiles ]

 East Anglia Flood Defences Final showcased in a story map the entire flooding infrastructure framework for the region, both from rising sea levels and risk of flooding, complete w flood defence infrastructure.

Online discussions in the wake of the IPCC 2021 report broadened that scope back to an original posting almost two years ago Sea level rise models show ins&outs of climate change science. Here is that update expanding to England and NW Europe, wrapping in all the lessons learned along the way. 

"With a little help from my friends", Part II

Update: see an early 2025 to update these maps around the Thames Barrier here.

New how-to 

Part I showed how a map of DEFRA open data can help situational awareness for a West Midlands XR event. Having done a sea level rise and risk of flooding map for the Thames River valley near London last year, I redid one now with the lessons learned in the interval. The previous Sea Level Rise map from Open Data was rather onerous: I streamlined the process to simply load free & open data with only GIS styling; the resulting Build your own can be replicated on other GIS with listed data sources.

Land cover to study East Anglia peatlands evolution

Community Engagement  1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 & 19

[ Update 3: next installment integrates this + companion below in peatland assessment

Update 2: see next how to re-use, clip & correct Natural England's Natural Capital Atlas

Update 1: added Living Atlas, ESA & USGS land cover and Natural England peat lands ]

Having concluded a comprehensive synopsis on risk of flooding and sea level rise, an opportunity arose to look at land cover classification with the data below and two peat land experts who will help with this.

"With a little help from my friends"

[ Update:  Part II re-uses this and improves the manual for a London area action ]

Part of our mandate at cottenham.info is to raise awareness around climate change issues in East Anglia. A key part is to quantify risks around flooding from land during increasingly variable weather, as well as to predict what sea level rise would look like over time from melting polar ice caps. That combines respectively excellent ground work by DEFRA - see their Future Fens twitter feed - and modelling against topography by Ordnance Survey and DEFRA. And timing of sea level rises is an emotional issue: to balance the reality of the risk with questions around time scales (see comment), will help raise awareness without unduly raising alarm.

East Anglia Flood Defences Update

Community Engagement  1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 & 17

[ Update: the next blogpost extends this into a 3d interactive map wrapping up this 2 years study ]

This closes the trio of updates on sea level rise timelines and infrastructure based on newly available climate change data, since this project started two years ago. 

Environment Agency's DEFRA not only manages a comprehensive Risk of Flooding for River and from Sea via ground observations and mapping, but it also manages all the infrastructure related to flood risks from the same. 

Let's extend our ongoing mapping effort here to include AIMS Spatial Flood Defences (inc. standardised attributes):

East Anglia sea level rise infrastructure update

Community Engagement  1, ... 12, 13, 14, 15 & 16

[ Update 3: the next installment includes Environment Agency's flood defence data

Update 2: here is an update via Enviro. Agency's outreach twitter @FutureFens

Update 1: here is a story map augmenting the last two posts with live maps... enjoy! ]

Following on the previous timelines update focusing on Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combine Authority, this is an East Anglia-wide update based on Environment Agency (EA) Survey,  Office for National Statistics (ONS) Geoportal and Ordnance Survey (OS) Open Zoomstack data. 

Flood preparedness in East Anglia as a Story map

[ Update: here is a final version for finer-grained subdivision of the same data ]

This is the third in a series of Story Maps after Sea Level Rise models in Cambridge, East Anglia and on Local Flooding in Cottenham immediately north. Full page here.