Jacqueline McGlade on monitoring the environment from space

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An ecologist who fell in love with computing, Jacqueline McGlade pioneered the use of satellites study the state of the global environment. Today thanks to programmes like Google Earth, we can see the surface of the earth in great detail. But when Jacqueline was a student, earth observation satellites were used for weather forecasting and not much else. Early in her career, she used satellite images to study fish populations, thinking it would be useful to know not only how many fish were in the sea but where they were likely to be. Few believed such an ambitious undertaking would be possible but, after a spell in Silicon Valley, Jacqueline found a way. The moving maps she created changed the way oceanographers and fishermen viewed the sea. In the early 1980s, she started trying to model the global climate using some of the earliest supercomputers and a roomful of un-networked PCs. As Executive Director of the European Environment Agency, she introduced monitoring systems for a range of environmental indicators and insisted that the information provided by Europe’s first earth observation satellite should be made available to everyone for free. She retired from her latest job, as chief scientist to the United Nations Environment Programme last year and now lives in a mud hut in the Masai Mara, having married a Masai chief. Producer: Anna Buckley

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service.
0:04.7	Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests.
0:08.8	Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook.
0:11.2	Technology doesn't want to be good or bad.
0:15.0	It's in the hands of the creator.
0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.7	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing.
0:26.0	Julie, at your service, listen to all episodes on BBC Sales. BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:36.0	Jacqueline McLade makes mathematical models to describe the behavior of the natural world.
0:42.0	For her PhD, she studied everything there was to know about a single species of fish, the
0:46.7	Brooke Trout.
0:48.3	By the age of 26 she was running a Fisheries and Oceans research lab for the Federal
0:52.4	Government of Canada.
0:54.0	And she went on to develop sophisticated computer models for all sorts of environmental systems,
0:59.0	from fish populations to epidemics and global climate change. As Executive Director of the European
1:05.8	Environment Agency, she set up Europe-wide monitoring systems providing real-time
1:10.6	data on air and water quality across the continent, before becoming Chief
1:15.3	Scientist for the United Nations Environment Program.
1:18.8	Jacqueline McLade, welcome to the Life Scientific.
1:20.8	Thank you very much.
1:21.8	You've recently retired from the United Nations. What are you up to now?
1:26.4	Well I've taken on a completely different stage in my career and it's frankly like going back to the beginning
	...

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