International Environmental Data Rescue Organization Limited

Causes: Environment, Marine Science & Oceanography, Natural Resources Conservation & Protection, Physical & Earth Sciences, Technology

Mission: There exists a time-critical situation affecting the world?s capacity to deal with disease, hunger and starvation. Most affected are the poorest countries, the elderly, women and children. Unfortunately, the results of inaction are not ?newsworthy? and do not garner as much funding or political support as a Pacific tsunami killing 250,000 people once every 100 years. However, efforts successfully addressing this situation could easily save ten times that number every year. IEDRO rescues historic environmental data (i.e. old weather observations) throughout the world. We provide for their digitization and free distribution so that the world community can benefit. These paper-based data are disappearing at the rate of over 100,000 observations each day due to fire, vermin, flood, age and lack of storage space. Once these critical data are lost, they are lost forever. Forecasts of the spread of air-borne diseases such as malaria are now possible so that health workers can take preventative measures in advance of the arrival of the disease-spreading mosquitoes. These accurate forecasts of the disease vectors are possible by correlating previous disease outbreaks with historical meteorological data. Without the historic data, no correlation studies would be possible. Subsistence farming families, living in hunger and on the edge of starvation can manage to keep their families fed by planting a new strain of rice developed to produce 20% less in a year with average rainfall, yet yielding a significant crop even in the driest years when the rice previously grown would have produced nothing except starvation. Historical weather data can convince most farmers to use the new rice when the analysis shows a drought frequency of one year out of every 7 instead of every 20 as previously thought. This one activity could save millions of lives. There are other benefits to data rescue including climate change and global warming (glacier photos we are trying to rescue in Patagonia are the same kind as depicted in the film "An Inconvenient Truth"), building and bridge construction, flood forecasting, but the health and food aspects are most important in saving lives. IEDRO sends data rescue experts to developing countries to help the local data caretakers/owners identify, and compile the old paper-based records for rescue. Once the records are ready, another team provides personal computers, digital cameras, copy stands and blank CD-ROMS and trains the local data caretakers to photograph every page of data, burn the images onto CD-ROMs and return a CD copy to us for digitization. Once the records are digitized, a copy is returned to the data caretakers and the data are also added to the world environmental data base through the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC for the open and unrestricted use of the entire world community. To date, we have supported the rescue and digitization of over 300,000 weather observations in Africa and South America.