Can you see human wellbeing from the space

As a computational social scientist in the Global Restoration Initiative team, I explore how landscape restoration can benefit local communities and address socioeconomic challenges. With questions like "how can we solve data scarcity in socioeconomic development monitoring?" and "how can we translate socioeconomic monitoring problems into data problems?", I'm passionate about driving sustainable development through innovative approaches.

The mission of the Global Restoration Initiative is to restore degraded and deforested landscapes, promoting biodiversity and climate mitigation. While human well-being is a critical component of restoration, socioeconomic well-being has often been overlooked due to a lack of sufficient data. However, recent advances in artificial intelligence have enabled us to reveal well-being indices from satellite imagery using computer vision neural networks at a high level of detail.

To address the challenge of data scarcity, I led a project to leverage state-of-the-art technology, combining satellite imagery with ground survey data to map the wealth development index at a district level. This work aims to complete the missing components of socioeconomic monitoring of a comprehensive Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) framework and advance our understanding of the socioeconomic impacts of landscape restoration.

Want to know more about this project? Please find the link here.