Some long term interesting approaches related to Green technology are finally emerging. Planetary Skin is one of them.
And this is the need that the Planetary Skin concept addresses. In a nutshell, Planetary Skin is a massive global-monitoring system of environmental conditions that will enable effective decision making in the private and public sectors and in communities, with data that is collected from myriad sources including space, airborne, maritime, terrestrial and people-based sensor networks, analyzed, verified and reported over an open standards based Web 2.0 and 3.0 collaborative spaces for decision makers.
This information presented and used correctly has potential to become more useful than Google Maps. This could be used for planning and decision making in applications ranging from Agriculture to traffic. Exciting.