Satellites & drones

Strong controls & high transparency over mining is one of our key supporting recommendations. Aerial imagery is an obvious technology that can be used to monitor illegal mining, the forests, rivers, transport and much else. The World Bank has a fascinating blog post on the various ways that satellite and drones can be used by civil society for monitoring. Imagery is becoming higher resolution, more frequent and cheaper. An extensive ecosystem has developed permitting unified search for images, cloud storage and processing. Here’s a good starting point for using aerial imagery in civil society.