The planet is changing at unprecedented rates. From extreme weather events like flood, wildfire, extreme heat, and drought to shifting growing seasons, new ranges for disease vectors, severe stress on our natural resources and food systems, climate change is happening now. And it is expected to get worse.
One of the core functions of the public sector is to develop policies to maintain social and economic stability and security. Yet even under the most optimistic scenarios where we drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, our climate is changing in ways that fundamentally undercuts this stability and security. This is because social and economic systems such as infrastructure, energy, agriculture, health care, and finance have been built on the assumption that the climate will remain steady. While there is uncertainty in terms of how much the climate will change, what we know for certain is that the future will not look like the past. Extreme weather events will become more frequent and more severe, the world will continue to warm, and the costs of climate impacts will increase.
Our current and future economic and environmental security depends on the public sector’s ability to keep up with, understand, and respond quickly to these changes. It depends on this happening across departments and agencies such as health, finance, environment, agriculture, natural resources, infrastructure, and others. It requires actions to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions while reducing risks of extreme weather events. And, it requires data to help drive these decisions at scales from the hyper local to the global. The scope of this challenge is not only urgent, it is one of the world’s biggest ‘big-data’ problems.
Fortunately, new technologies to help us monitor the Earth are proliferating. Thousands of satellites and drones are taking millions of images of the planet every day. Sensors are generating data about temperature, precipitation, wind, soil conditions, and more, sometimes every second. We have more information about the planet and its systems than at any other time in history. And this is only going to grow. The problem is not the lack of data. The challenge is how can we harness this data to drive insights for decision makers to tackle climate change?
Climate Engine has partnered with Google to help solve this problem.
Climate Engine is a scientist-led company that helps Google accelerate and scale the use of Google Cloud’s world-class geospatial capacities (Google Earth Engine, Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery, among other tools) in support of climate action for the public sector. It provides departments and agencies with a centralized system to ingest, process, and deliver Earth data into decision making contexts.
Being able to draw insights into how landscapes are changing, what physical and natural assets are at risk, and where opportunities are for reducing emissions and increasing carbon sequestration are going to be increasingly critical for agencies and departments at all levels of government to fulfill their mandates. Climate Engine and Google Cloud are providing the core infrastructure to do exactly that.