Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog

At Google, we’re committed to building a clean energy future because we we want to be good environmental stewards, and because we think it makes business sense. We’ve had a busy year with our clean energy initiatives. Take look at our redesigned green website and this new video from the Google green team to learn more about the priorities we’re pursuing:




As we look back on 2010, we wanted to highlight what we’ve been working on this year to help build a more sustainable future—for Google, and the world.

• Greening our operations. We already have the most energy efficient data centers in the world, and use renewable energy whenever possible. This year we created a subsidiary, Google Energy LLC, to enable us to purchase renewable energy on the wholesale power markets and to help spur development in the sector.
  
  
  • Flexibility in buying renewable energy. In February, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted Google Energy LLC the authority to buy and sell energy on the wholesale market, giving us the flexibility to procure renewable energy at competitive prices.
    
    
  • 20-year green power purchase. Our FERC authority enabled Google Energy LLC to enter a 20-year green Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) in July to buy clean energy from 114 megawatts (MW) of wind generation at NextEra’s Story County II facility in Iowa (read more about how the deal is structured). By purchasing so much energy for so long, we’re giving the developer financial certainty to build additional clean energy projects.
    
    
• Developing green products and tools. Just a few weeks ago, during the the U.N. Climate Change Conference in sunny Cancun, Mexico, we launched Google Earth Engine, a new Google Labs product. Google Earth Engine is a technology platform that makes an unprecedented catalog of imagery and data available online in one place for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment. We’re particularly excited about the initial use of Google Earth Engine to support efforts to stop global deforestation. We’ve also been busy this year incorporating green features into our products—like Google Maps biking directions and adding Carbon Disclosure Project ratings into Google Finance.


• Investing in a clean energy future. To date, Google has invested over $100 million in clean energy. Google.org has already invested in several clean technology companies. We’ve also continued our internal R&D on renewable energy technologies (RE<C), substantially growing our engineering team. And this year, Google began making project investments that offer a solid financial return, and could have a transformational impact on the renewable energy sector.
  
  
  • North Dakota wind farms. In May, we invested $38.8 million in two North Dakota wind farms that generate 169.5MW, enough to power 55,000 homes. It was our first project investment, and uses some of the latest wind turbine technology and control systems to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of renewable energy to the local grid.
    
    
  • Offshore wind transmission. In October, we made a development stage investment in a project to build a backbone transmission line off the Mid-Atlantic coast. The project will put in place strong, secure transmission, removing a major barrier to scaling up offshore wind. When finished, the 350-mile line will connect up to 6,000MW of offshore wind energy—enough to serve approximately 1.9 million households!

It’s been a busy year at Google, and we believe the world needs better options in the future. As we head into the new year, we look forward to continuing our work to find and support innovative clean energy solutions.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar

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In September we announced Health Speaks, an initiative to make more quality health information available in local languages on the Internet. We began by launching three pilots for which people crowd-sourced translation of English Wikipedia health articles into Arabic, Hindi and Swahili.

After an inspiring 3.5 months, these pilots have come to a close. Health Speaks communities translated, reviewed and published 266 new health articles (177 in Arabic, 79 in Hindi and 10 in Swahili). My colleague, Dr. Joanne Stevens, and I met hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers, and heard powerful stories about the importance of local language health information. We’ve also learned invaluable lessons about providing tools that allow for community coordination and easy and accurate translation.

Our first Health Speaks pilots pledged a donation of 3 US cents per English word translated to three non-profit organizations working in health. As an extra thank you to the volunteers who were so generous with their time as we tested our approach for the first time, we are adding an additional $10,000 donation to each NGO. Their contribution has resulted in donations of $26,611, $16,815 and $10,580 to the Children's Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357 (Arabic), the Public Health Foundation of India (Hindi) and the African Medical and Research Foundation (Swahili) respectively.

Dr. Joanne Stevens and I lead a translation session in Tanzania.

While we iterate on our future approach for crowd-sourcing the translation of health content, there are still many ways to contribute to the goals of Health Speaks. We encourage anyone who is passionate about local language health information to consider one or more of the following:

• Authoring a health article on Wikipedia or another platform
• Creating a health information-based blog
• Translating Wikipedia or other health articles into another language
• Bringing offline local language health information online, through digitization programs such as Google Books
  

Lastly, we would like to give a special mention to the many Wikipedians who worked with us by training others and providing help with Wikipedia, as well as to our top contributors for each pilot.

We’re already seeing evidence of the impact of our volunteers’ hard work. For example, three reproductive health-related articles in Arabic have been viewed over 20,000 times. Articles from the Health Speaks pilots (including the professionally translated articles commissioned by Google.org) have been viewed over 145,000 times. We think it’s a great first step towards making important health information accessible online in all languages.

Posted by Jennifer Haroon, Manager, Health Initiatives, Google.org

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(Cross-posted from The Official Google Blog)

The past couple of years have been a challenging stretch for charitable organizations as giving tends to decline during economic downturns when the need is highest. Charitable giving was down 3.6% in 2009, only the second year there’s been a drop since Giving USA began their reports in 1956. We continue to be inspired, however, by organizations that have stepped up with creative and effective programs to address today’s challenges. We’re grateful for the millions of Google users who helped continue our success in 2010, and we want to do our part to help charitable organizations that are working tirelessly to meet increased need with decreased funding.

In this spirit, our global sales team led by Nikesh Arora is giving a $20 million holiday gift that will provide:

• Schooling for 15,000 kids in poor communities in India through Bharti Foundation.
• Access to vital medication and health services, especially for women and girls, in post-conflict areas in Africa through Global Strategies for HIV Prevention.
• Vaccines to protect 50 million children from polio through UNICEF.
• Strategic support and online tools for 1.5 million social entrepreneurs through partners including Ashoka, NTEN, APC and LASA.
• Environmental education in the National Parks for 40,000 students through NatureBridge.

We will exceed our 2010 target this year with charitable giving, with more than $145 million going to non-profits and academic institutions, and more than $184 million in total giving when including Google Grants, Google.org technology projects and product support for non-profits. Some of our major initiatives include:

• Supporting science and math education and education reform through partners including New Schools Venture, Teach for All, Citizens Schools and Posse Foundation. We provide scholarships to help dismantle barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields. We also support the next generation of engineers and maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide that are pursuing research in areas relevant to our mission.
  
  
• Responding to natural disasters in Pakistan, Haiti, China and Chile and humanitarian crises through partners such as Rural Development Institute, Eastern Congo Initiative, Engineers without Borders and Nahdet El Mahrousa.
  
  
• Promoting technology solutions that empower underserved groups and emerging economies such as Camfed, Digital Divide Data, igotITtoo and Samasource.
  
  
• Strengthening communities where we live and work, such as Friends of the High Line in New York and Age Action in Dublin.

To keep up with Googlers’ generosity in their personal giving, we also increased our charitable matching to $12,000 per employee. We thank our partners and all those who use Google for their continued business and wish everyone a happy, healthy holiday season.

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Director, Charitable Giving

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(Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Blog)

*Update, December 15 at 17:15 PT: The 48 hour period of Project for Awesome starts at 9am PT / noon ET on Friday, December 17, and the live stream will take place from 4pm to 7pm PT on Saturday, December 18.*

Three years ago, the vlogbrothers Hank and John kick-started an initiative called Project for Awesome, which called for YouTube users across the world to “take over YouTube” by creating videos that promote their favorite charities and causes. Project for Awesome built on its initial success again in 2008, resulting in thousands of user submissions and a homepage takeover, as people around YouTube took to the web to make the world more awesome for the holidays. Hank and John upped the ante last year by increasing community participation, making Project for Awesome (#p4a) one of the top trending topics on Twitter in December 2009.



Project for Awesome 2010 officially begins on December 17 at 12:01 AM, when users are encouraged to upload videos for their favorite causes and charities. To celebrate the end of Project for Awesome on Saturday, December 18, join us for a live show on YouTube at www.youtube.com/p4a. We’re teaming up with the vlogbrothers, some of YouTube’s biggest stars like daneboe of Annoying Orange, Michelle Phan, Phil DeFranco, Michael Buckley, Shay Carl, and iJustine, and prominent nonprofit organizations to broadcast a four hour live show from 4 - 8pm PST. The live show involves a wide array of entertainment: from musical performances to user-generated games to special moments that only YouTube can bring. Moreover, this year, Project for Awesome will focus on raising awareness and encouraging action in four areas: innovation in education, health, poverty, and children’s wish-giving.

Representatives from eight charities will be in attendance at this next-generation telethon: including Beatbullying, DonorsChoose, Make a Wish Foundation, Marine Toys For Tots Foundation, Open University, Partners in Health, Save The Children, and Water.org.

And, as in past years, we’re encouraging the global YouTube community to create videos on behalf of these charities and the causes you’re most passionate about. Post them to your site, tweet them, put them on Facebook - do whatever you can to spread the awesome this holiday season. We look forward to seeing what you create, and hope you join us online this Saturday for a ton of awesomeness!

Posted by Margaret Healy, Strategic Partner Manager, YouTube

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Today, we launched a new Google Labs product called Google Earth Engine at the International Climate Change Conference in sunny Cancun, Mexico. Google Earth Engine is a new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data—current and historical—online for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment. The platform will enable scientists to use our extensive computing infrastructure—the Google “cloud”—to analyze this imagery. Last year, we demonstrated an early prototype. Since then, we have developed the platform, and are excited now to offer scientists around the world access to Earth Engine to implement their applications.

Why is this important? The images of our planet from space contain a wealth of information, ready to be extracted and applied to many societal challenges. Scientific analysis can transform these images from a mere set of pixels into useful information—such as the locations and extent of global forests, detecting how our forests are changing over time, directing resources for disaster response or water resource mapping.

Congo Basin Water Map (detail): Original satellite image (left) and derived water map (right), created using Google Earth Engine [Potapov, P., Hansen,M. - South Dakota State University].

The challenge has been to cope with the massive scale of satellite imagery archives, and the computational resources required for their analysis. As a result, many of these images have never been seen, much less analyzed. Now, scientists will be able to build applications to mine this treasure trove of data on Google Earth Engine, providing several advantages:

• Landsat satellite data archives over the last 25 years for most of the developing world available online, ready to be used together with other datasets including MODIS. And we will soon offer a complete global archive of Landsat.
• Reduced time to do analyses, using Google’s computing infrastructure. By running analyses across thousands of computers, for example, unthinkable tasks are now possible for the first time.
• New features that will make analysis easier, such as tools that pre-process the images to remove clouds and haze.
• Collaboration and standardization by creating a common platform for global data analysis.
  

Google Earth Engine can be used for a wide range of applications—from mapping water resources to ecosystem services to deforestation. It’s part of our broader effort at Google to build a more sustainable future. We’re particularly excited about an initial use of Google Earth Engine to support development of systems to monitor, report and verify (MRV) efforts to stop global deforestation.

Deforestation releases a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere, accounting for 12-18% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. The world loses 32 million acres of tropical forests every year, an area the size of Greece. The United Nations has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) that would provide financial incentives to tropical nations to protect their forests. Reaching an agreement on early development of REDD is a key agenda item here in Cancun.

Today, we announced that we are donating 10 million CPU-hours a year over the next two years on the Google Earth Engine platform, to strengthen the capacity of developing world nations to track the state of their forests, in preparation for REDD. For the least developed nations, Google Earth Engine will provide critical access to terabytes of data, a growing set of analytical tools and our high-performance processing capabilities. We believe Google Earth Engine will bring transparency and more certainty to global efforts to stop deforestation.

We’ve been working with several partners to fully develop this platform. In particular, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has been a key strategic and funding partner. The Moore Foundation has also committed over $12 million dollars through its Environmental Conservation Program to projects that support the development of Google Earth Engine. The Moore Foundation’s Environment Program finances practical, enduring solutions to environmental challenges and works to improve the way society uses and manages important terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal marine ecosystems to create working land and seascapes that support resilient and productive ecosystems for current and future generations. They’ve funded the U.S. Geological Survey to scale their infrastructure and accelerate bringing historic Landsat data off tape, and online, through Google Earth Engine.

This animation shows the breadth and depth of the Landsat archive that has been uploaded into Google Earth Engine to date. We are grateful to the USGS for their ongoing technical collaboration.

Support from the Moore Foundation includes funding for several scientists to develop and integrate their desktop software to work online with the data available in Google Earth Engine. Those scientists -- Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Carlos Souza of Imazon -- are also key partners, along with Matt Hansen of the Geographic Information Science Center at South Dakota State University. All are at the cutting edge of forest monitoring in support of climate science.

In collaboration with Matt Hansen and CONAFOR, Mexico’s National Forestry Commission, we’ve produced a forest cover and water map of Mexico. This is the finest-scale forest map produced of Mexico to date. The map required 15,000 hours of computation, but was completed in less than a day on Google Earth Engine, using 1,000 computers over more than 53,000 Landsat scenes (1984-2010). CONAFOR provided National Forest Inventory ground-sampled data to calibrate and validate the algorithm.

A forest cover and water map of Mexico (southern portion, including the Yucatan peninsula), produced in collaboration with scientist Matthew Hansen and CONAFOR.

We hope that Google Earth Engine will be an important tool to help institutions around the world manage forests more wisely. As we fully develop the platform, we hope more scientists will use new Earth Engine API to integrate their applications online—for deforestation, disease mitigation, disaster response, water resource mapping and other beneficial uses. If you’re interested in partnering with us, we want to hear from you—visit our website! We look forward to seeing what’s possible when scientists, governments, NGO’s, universities, and others gain access to data and computing resources to collaborate online to help protect the earth’s environment.

Update on 12/6: Additional information on the Moore Foundation, Google Earth Engine’s Landsat archive, and the Congo Basin Water Map have been added to the post.

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google Earth Engine

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(Cross-posted from The Official Google Blog)

Occasionally, we invite distinguished guests to contribute to our blogs and we’re very happy to have Wangari Maathai share her perspective here. In collaboration with Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement and several other partners, the Google Earth Outreach team has created several narrated tours on the topic of climate change in preparation for the UNFCCC’s COP16 Climate Summit 2010 in Cancun, Mexico. Fly underwater to learn about the effects of ocean acidification on sea life with Oceana. Zoom around Mexican mangroves in 3D and learn about the importance of this biodiverse habitat... and what must be done to protect it for future generations. Visit google.com/landing/cop16/climatetours.html to experience these tours. -Ed.

Ask most people what trees mean to them and the first thing that comes to mind is the tree outside their bedroom window or the forest where they played as a child. Trees do occupy a powerful place in our emotions, but the most powerful argument to protect our world’s trees is not based on sentiment. There is a vital interdependency between communities and the trees they rely on for survival. Trees are our watersheds, protectors of the natural environment, and sources of food. Remove the trees from the equation and the community feels the impact.

I came to this realization in the 1970s in Kenya. I was talking to women in my community about their problems: hunger, access to water, poverty, wood fuel. I saw a link between their needs and the condition of the land and thought, “Why not plant trees to address these issues?” Trees hold the soil to the ground so that we can grow food in it, they protect watersheds and facilitate harvesting of rain water, fruits trees supplement food and trees give us domestic energy and wood with which to build our shelters. So while still working at the University of Nairobi, I established a tree nursery in my backyard, planted seven trees at a public park and founded the Green Belt Movement. The organization works to empower communities, to build their capacity to restore Africa's forests and put an end to the problems that deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation cause. As a result of this idea, more than 40 million trees have been planted to restore the environment and improve the lives of the people who are linked to the land.

When we were offered a unique opportunity to partner with the Google Earth Outreach team on a project using new Google Earth technology to visualize trees in 3D, we were thrilled. For accuracy and integrity we worked very closely with Google, advising them on the modeling of unique African trees like the broad-leaved Croton, the Nile tulip tree and the East African Cordia. These tree models illustrate the biodiversity in our tree planting sites, especially in the forests, and how we carefully select trees that are indigenous and sustainable to the natural surroundings.

Broad-leaved Croton, the Nile tulip tree and the East African Cordia (from left to right)

We then used data from real planting locations to “plant” the tree models in Google Earth and create 3D visualizations. Now, for the first time in Google Earth, people from all over the world will be able to virtually visit these planting sites, explore the 3D trees and connect with the work that we are doing.

Green Belt Movement planting site in 3D on Google Earth

Tree planting is a simple activity with tangible results, and anyone can participate. It helps people come together to address common problems and work collectively towards community improvement and sustainability. I hope that seeing our beautiful tree planting sites in 3D on Google Earth will be a source of inspiration for people to engage, plant trees and organize planting activities in their own communities. Taking charge of our lives and the environment around us can help ensure a lasting legacy and healthy future for our children.



Learn more about the Green Belt Movement and support our work at http://www.greenbeltmovement.org.

Posted by Wangari Maathai, environmentalist, activist and founder of the Green Belt Movement

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