Environmental governance refers to the systems and policies put in place to manage natural resources. This involves creating procedures around who is in charge of environmental affairs, implementing policy that helps manage environmental resources in a sustainable way, and forming pathways for communities and the public to have a say in governance. An important part of environmental governance is making decisions according to robust scientific studies.

NASA’s Earth-observing instruments collect data on processes such as wildfires and floods, heat islands, and the extent of forests, cities, and other types of land cover. NASA also curates socioeconomic data such as food insecurity surveys and sustainability indexes to capture human-centric environmental effects that satellites can’t detect. These data help researchers and decision-makers understand how the environment is changing and which policies might create the best outcomes.

Our data products useful for environmental governance and management include studies of water resources, maps of climate-related risks, and environmental performance indexes. Some of these studies are limited to a specific region, while others survey the entire populated land mass of Earth.