Presenting the GEESE use case at the SAGE consortium meeting

In November, members of the SAGE consortium gathered to agree on plans for the Green Deal Data Space (GDDS). Our team at Utrecht University joined to represent the usecase on Global Environmental Exposures, together with our partners at SURF. The SAGE project aims to enhance the access, linking and use of 'green' data. Alongside nine other use cases and workpackages, we shared progress and pinpointed our sector-specific requirements for the GDDS.

GEESE (the Global Environmental Exposure dataspace) fits in the GDDS not just because of the 'greenness' of the usecase, supporting climate adaptation and public health strategies. It also fits because of its interdisciplinary and data-heavy nature. Environmental exposures significantly affect human health and disease. Think for instance about the effects of being exposed to air pollution, floodrisk, allergenic pollen, but also to green space or conflict. These exposures are modelled by experts across many disciplines; ranging from natural hazards in the hydrological or geological domain, to societal indicators or our built environment, shaping how we live, eat and move. This data is relevant for a wide variety of users, such as health researchers, decision-makers or humanitarian organisations. These users may have limited geocomputational skill, which is why it is so important to supply geospatial tools and harmonized data in order to lower technological barriers.

Today, most exposure studies are fragmented and project bound. Large datasets are searched, stored and processed again and again. This ad-hoc approach is not only inefficient and unsustainable, it results in poor reproducibility and has, so far, prevented multi-exposure global scale assessments. Harmonized processing does not have to interfere with privacy, because GEESE will not store or process personal health data. Instead, researchers can keep their cohort data on their own machines and can request the corresponding environmental exposure subsets through APIs.

With SAGE, we are moving away from isolated studies and datasupply and towards accessible harmonised geospatial assessments. This way, we enable researchers from many disciplines and also those with limited geocomputational background, to work with geospatial data. Furthermore, collecting a wide variety of global variables allows us to identify spatial patterns that inform epidemiological research and shed light on environmental inequities. Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we will dive into the specifics of these exposure assessments we are currently conducting!