Google has a long tradition of caring about the environment – even before it was considered mainstream. It all started in 1999 when it was decided that company desks would be made from repurposed wood. Check out some of the latest things they are doing today!

Here are three of the latest environmental initiatives that the company is involved with. To see the full list, please visit: https://environment.google/

Oceans of data: tracking illegal fishing over 1.4 billion square miles

“The oceans are big — 1.4 billion square miles big, or about 71% of the earth’s surface, less than 5% of which has even been explored. Hundreds of millions of people depend on the oceans for their livelihood; more than a billion rely on fish as their primary source of nutrition. But today, threatened by illegal fishing, overfishing, and habitat destruction, the global fish population is in crisis; some species’ numbers have dropped by a staggering 90%. What’s worse, until very recently, the sheer vastness of the oceans meant that nobody could even measure much of this damaging activity, let alone do anything about it. ” – Google Environmental Report 2017 [read more]

Earth Engine creates a living map of forest loss

“In 2005, a Google engineer named Rebecca Moore got a notice about a logging plan near her home in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The mailing included a grainy black-and-white map that did nothing to show what was at stake with the plan. Dissatisfied, she decided to create a new map using details of the plan overlaid on the 3-D satellite imagery in Google Earth. Moore’s visualization illuminated what was really at stake: where exactly the 1,000 acres of logging would occur, the threats to water and old-growth redwoods, even the narrow mountain roads where logging trucks would be navigating blind curves near kids walking to school.” – Google Environmental Report 2017 [read more]

Reaching our solar potential, one rooftop at a time

The sun produces an astonishing amount of energy. In one second it generates enough to meet the needs of civilization for 500,000 years. More important, enough sunshine hits the earth in a single hour to power the global economy for a full year. Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of that energy is captured. If all the suitable rooftops in the U.S. had solar panels, they could supply 39% of the nation’s energy needs. In short, humanity is sitting on — or rather, under — some massive potential with solar energy. Why is solar still so undervalued? – Google Environmental Report 2017 [read more]