6 Ways GPS Technology Saves the Environment

For most people, “GPS” is the tool they use in their car or on their smartphone to avoid getting lost along the way. The Global Positioning System used in the United States may be a common technology in our daily lives, but it actually started as a military project for the US Navy conducting submarine tracking experiments in the 1960s. But ironically, GPS cannot work underwater!

As the 1970s progressed, the U.S. Department of Defense desperately needed a global navigation and positioning system, and this research culminated in the NAVSTAR satellite in 1978. Today, the GPS we use is not the only choice either, as various countries have specific satellite tracking systems, including China’s advanced GPS alternative and Russia’s GLONASS system. Once GPS became widely available, scientists around the world began to take advantage of it to participate in research that helps us preserve the environment, and private companies used it to reduce costs and therefore waste. So even though it was created for war, GPS is now saving the planet in a variety of unexpected ways.

Before the era of GPS, scientists tracked movements – particularly of endangered species – using radio telemetry technology. The animals were collared or marked with a radio transmitter and the signal was then sent to a receiver, but to work the receiver had to be within a mile or two of the transmitter. When GPS came onto the scene, it revolutionized conservation, making it possible to track the exact location of marked animals in real time. With this data, conservationists can keep tabs on endangered animals in the air, on land, and even in the sea.

It is more difficult to track and tag aquatic animals since the location only sounds when the GPS tracker is near the surface. This information is invaluable not only for tracking endangered ocean life, like North Atlantic right whales, but also potentially dangerous animals, like great white sharks. Many animal species have benefited from GPS tracking technology, and as climate change takes hold, it will become even more crucial to understand what is happening in the world’s different ecosystems.

A law is not worth the paper it is printed on if it cannot be enforced. There are many laws around the world that aim to reduce or prevent pollution or alleviate problems like poaching. Law enforcement cannot be everywhere and it is sometimes difficult to prove that acts such as poaching or illegal hunting have taken place. Thus, GPS tracking can be used as a high-tech solution to enforce environmental laws.

In 2023, a team of researchers demonstrated how GPS-tagged wolves and vultures could reveal how laws surrounding the disposal of animal carcasses were being broken. More recently, the BBC highlighted how researchers are using a satellite system that can track animal movement behavior in real time to detect “animal panic” resulting from events like a gunshot. GPS monitoring is a privacy issue for humans – Google knows where you are even when your GPS is turned off – but for animals and the environment as a whole, 24-hour real-time monitoring can help ensure that environmental laws are properly enforced.

If you’ve never been in a wildfire, you know that most people can’t fathom how quickly flames move or how unpredictably they can change direction. This makes the situation extremely dangerous for firefighters on the ground, even with eyes in the sky transmitting visual information about the fire to a ground station. In the past, it was simply not possible to get a detailed picture of how the fire was spreading, but that has changed thanks to GPS tracking.

By equipping aircraft with GPS and infrared (IR) scanners, fires can be mapped with a high level of accuracy. Firefighters in the field then use a field laptop to receive live map information. Combined with other data, this technology provides an unprecedented level of information about a disaster as it occurs. This allows firefighters to coordinate dynamically, with enough warning to evacuate people and send adequate firefighting resources to the areas that need them most.

Drones are also becoming a crucial part of wildfire management. Modern drone technology is only possible thanks to GPS. GPS could therefore be as crucial to fire management in the modern era as water and fire-retardant chemicals. If you want to know what it’s like to be on the ground for these firefighters, watch this incredible GoPro video of a battle against a massive wildfire.

Until we finally achieve infinite clean energy, the world likely won’t be able to shake off its dependence on fossil fuels. This means that crude oil must be transported across our oceans and, inevitably, these ships sometimes spill this oil during massive environmental disasters. Today, GPS technology certainly helps ships avoid the kind of problem that could lead to a spill in the first place, but when the worst happens, it can also track spills afterwards.

In a 2020 study, scientists were able to use GPS drifters alongside drones to track where oil goes after a spill and how long it stays there. This information makes it possible to predict the evolution of oil spills, which facilitates their planning and limits the damage they can cause. Today, radar satellites and floating beacons accurately track spills, allowing disaster recovery efforts to be as effective as possible. The ideal situation would be to prevent oil spills in the first place, but in the meantime, every additional level of protection helps.

If you’ve ever watched “Back to the Future Part II,” you may remember at one point Doc Brown looked at his (presumably) smart watch while waiting for the rain to stop and then said, “Too bad the Post Office isn’t as good as the Weather Service.” You may have noticed that these days you will receive a notification from your weather app that “the rain will stop soon” or “the rain should start in a few hours.” It’s not exactly the down-to-the-second accuracy of Doc Brown in the movie, but it’s a lot better than the weather forecasts we got in the ’90s, for example. So you might as well have based your decision to get an umbrella on a coin toss.

Much of this improvement in modern forecast accuracy is due to incredible supercomputers capable of modeling the weather to a precise degree, but that data comes from GPS-enabled weather devices, not to mention satellite imagery. In 2020, scientists began measuring signals from GPS satellites as they pass through the Earth’s atmosphere to infer temperature and moisture content. This allows for more accurate weather forecasts.

The last time you used Google Maps to navigate somewhere, you may have noticed that it offered an option to “prefer fuel-efficient routes.” It may not be the quickest or shortest route to your destination, but it would use the least fuel and produce the least emissions. This is just one example of how GPS technology can directly reduce waste and emissions.

Even without a special eco-friendly route, GPS was already saving huge amounts of fuel all over the world, simply because vehicles spent less time getting lost or sitting in traffic – the small amounts of fuel you avoid burning by getting around these problems add up. In a 2019 report, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) noted that GPS technology had reduced fuel consumption and wear and tear on fleet vehicles. Not only is it good for the environment, but it also saves us money by reducing transportation costs.

It’s not just about vehicle emissions. In agriculture, crop spraying drones can accurately spray only the appropriate areas of a field, thereby reducing the overall amount of pesticides. This means fewer chemicals are needed to maintain our food supply and we make better use of natural resources.