S3E01 Down To Earth: Tackling the Earth’s Top Two Megatrends through Remote Sensing

By 2050, approximately 3 billion of the world’s population will live in cities, making urbanization – the population shift from rural to urban areas – the second-largest megatrend impacting life on our planet. What role does urbanization play in advancing climate change, and how does understanding urbanization trends help us mitigate climate change? In this episode, we speak to Dr. Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen, Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University's School of the Environment and one of the pioneers of the first deep learning method predicting 3-D urban structure information at 30m resolution across time. We discover how this work has allowed researchers to detect and learn from planning policies implemented by cities in the past, and the ways in which we can implement these learnings moving forward, to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities.