The military spy turned sustainability warrior - drones have come of age

Drones have come a long way, from their military origins as sinister hardware for spying and remote warfare to their more recent use by conservation charities monitoring whaling ships and rare bird nests.

This year’s Drones for Good awards finalists included social enterprises hoping to develop unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deliver vaccinations in Africa, provide better planning in India’s slums and help with international disaster relief planning.

In business, companies such as Amazon and Facebook have been grabbing the headlines and the public’s imagination with multimillion-dollar research into drones for same-day deliveries and to expand the internet to remote parts of the world. While these are a long way from commercial reality, other industries are finding numerous uses for drone technology – uses that could bring wider benefits to the environment and society, as well as greater efficiencies.

BP, granted the first commercial license to fly drones over US soil in June last year, uses UAVs to monitor its oil infrastructure in Alaska, helping to spot potential pipeline leaks and protect the safety of its workforce on the ground.

“This technology is proving invaluable at our Prudhoe Bay site, where floods, ice break-ups and ice floes constantly alter the topography, making other monitoring methods difficult, costly and time-consuming,” says a BP spokesperson.

Elsewhere, BP says it is using drones to produce 3D models of outcrops in Azerbaijan and has flown an unmanned “octocopter” around a 100m cooling tower in Hull to check its integrity, “removing the need for scaffolding and people working at height”.

Another multinational and one of the world’s largest agricultural companies, Cargill, is just starting to use drones to help monitor its commitment to zero deforestation in its palm oil supply chains in Indonesia.

“The drones will help us map, identify and monitor environmentally sensitive areas,” says Tom Vandyck, media specialist at Cargill. “They’ll also augment our efforts against burning and illegal forest clearing through faster and more accurate detection. With the right sensor on board, they can help us with yield intensification – a plus on the sustainability side, because it means more palm oil from the same amount of land.”

It’s an interesting example of a company employing the methods used by conservation charities campaigning against it as a tool for its own sustainability strategy. While it’s too earlyfor meaningful results from the drones, Vandyck says Cargill is planning to allow independent third parties to produce publicly-available maps of their plantations to ensure impartiality.

“As drones and sensors get more advanced, we can expect them to play increasingly important roles,” he says. “They’re cheaper to operate than acquiring images from satellites, deployable on short notice, unhindered by cloud cover and generate images at a much higher resolution.”

But he adds: “It’s important to note that drones alone do not improve sustainability – it is the action we take on the information gathered that makes the impact.”

Jonathan Evans, assistant land management adviser at the National Farmer’s Union, agrees that it’s the analysis of the data provided, and the management decisions drones help inform, that matter. Farmers have been among their earliest commercial adopters in the UK, and their use to survey crop health and yields, monitor livestock and even deter pigeons is increasing every year.

“The whole idea of drones in arable production is to improve production and efficiency, making more efficient use of pesticides and fertilisers by identifying sections that need them or where they can be best used,” says Evans. “The agronomists and farmers work alongside third party companies actually doing the analysis, so it’s creating more opportunities for these companies to grow.”

One such company is Ursula Agriculture, which began in 2013 as a research project funded by the Welsh Assembly and now works with international agrichemical companies such as Syngenta and Bayer Crop Science.

“We can identify weeds, like black grass, because it has a different spectral range than the crop,” says Ursula Agriculture’s William Allbrook. “We can be pretty precise, making a map, processing the data and providing it to a GPS tractor for spraying.”

Allbrook believes the market for drones in UK agriculture is “quite immature” and only economical for the big producers. But as the UAV industry starts to scale, prices will come down and the sight of unmanned drones flying across the UK countryside will become “routine”.

Certainly, the US and EU are actively preparing for a future economic boom around drones. Congress has instructed the Federal Aviation Administration to give commercial drones access to all US skies by September 2015. The EU announced plans last year to unify regulations around UAVs with the aim of creating 150,000 jobs in the sector by 2050.

“I think that’s a hugely conservative figure and the UK will take a large chunk of it,” says Gary Clayton, chairman of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems Association (UAVS), who gave evidence to a House of Lords report on the EU plans published in February. “There are thousands of jobs in UAVs in the UK already – operators, researchers, component manufacturers – and there are thousands more across Europe.”

UAVS was formed 18 years ago by a handful of UK independent operators and major defence companies. Now its membership numbers over a hundred and the Civil Aviation Authority has more than 600 licensed commercial UAV operators on its books.

“Ten years ago we thought drones would just be used for maritime surveillance and dull, dirty and dangerous work,” says Clayton. “Now they’re part of making BBC dramas, surveyors’ reports and oil production.

“The really big explosion will come when the technologies come that allow large systems to fly in national airspace,” he says, which could herald the introduction of unmanned aeroplanes that are lighter, faster and far more fuel efficient. “Then you’ll see everything from 150kg drones to 737s flying around.”

The technology and innovation hub is funded by BT. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled “brought to you by”. Find out more here.

Join the community of sustainability professionals and experts. Become a GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox.