Remote Sensing for Law Enforcement: Monitoring and Diagnosing Environmental and Urban Dynamics

Résumé En

Geography, law and cartography have always been intrinsically linked. The earliest known maps were used to record land ownership for tax collection purposes, and also to apply town planning law. They were also used for trade and to describe known worlds. In the mid-19th century, the advent of airborne remote sensing, with the first aerial photographs taken over Petit Clamart near Paris, revolutionized urban and regional planning. In the early 1970s, the advent of civil remote sensing from space, with the launch in 1973 of the Landsat 1 MSS satellite, multispectral sensors and computer processing of spatial data, radically transformed our relationship with geographical space, the Earth and the environment. The decommissioning of Soviet and US intelligence data on the Arctic as part of the joint Russian-American scientific commission in the mid-1990s, co-chaired by Albert Al Gore and Mikhail Gorbachev, brought the issue of global warming to the forefront of society's concerns, with the introduction of a geopolitics of environmental law in which space imagery and Earth observation play a central role... So much so that the US Earth Observation Landsat Programme was threatened with closure until the end of the 2000s. Remote sensing from space is used as a means of monitoring and enforcing environmental legislation, as well as generating environmental law and land management. Analyses based on remote sensing from space are leading to greater awareness in society, with diagnoses and maps of territorial realities and dynamics. The presentation will focus on several examples from France, Lithuania and the Arctic.