The new national center, the Swedish Competence Center for Satellite-Enabled Social Science Analytics (SESAC), will give social researchers greater access to satellite data and is seen as an important tool for contributing to sustainability, public health, inclusive growth, and crisis preparedness, among other things.
“There is a great need to bring together space data and social science. With SESAC, Sweden will be able to show how increased access to satellite data can contribute to a more sustainable and inclusive society,” says Ola Hall, cultural geographer and project manager for the center at Lund University.
The center is run by Lund University in close collaboration with researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Linköping University, Karlstad University, and others. The team includes experts in geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, regional development, sustainability, and security. Together with authorities, companies, and civil society, SESAC wants to develop new ways of using satellite images and other space data in areas such as social analysis and planning, thereby strengthening research, policy, and innovation.
"Some of us have been driving forces in, for example, the analysis of poverty in low-income countries using satellite images. We will now be able to study the physical environment in all its aspects even better, while at the same time adding a layer of social and economic variables that help us explain what we see on the ground,” says Ola Hall.
Through training courses, hackathons—events where participants collaborate to solve a problem or generate ideas, often in technology and programming—and an open digital knowledge hub, the center will contribute to building national expertise and disseminating tools for Earth Observation, known as EO-based analysis. EO analysis involves collecting, processing, and interpreting data about the Earth from space-based sources to better understand, for example, the atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces, and ecosystems, and is now being expanded to study challenges such as urban inequality and regional development.
Ola Hall sees great opportunities with the center:
“The real potential lies in being able to combine satellite images with Sweden's uniquely detailed statistics. Combined with the rapid development in AI, this opens up completely new opportunities to understand how places change over time and develop better decision support for research and social planning.”