Tech Giants and Governments are Helping Us Prepare for Climate Change

Sami Grover
Published: January 23,2017

A technician works at a computer at the 'Centre de meteorologie Spatiale' (Space Meteorology Centre, CMS) in Lannion, northwestern France. For 52 years, the CMS has been using and archiving for Meteo-France data from satellites distributed around the globe, information which today is invaluable in predicting climate change.
(GEORGES GOBET/AFP/Getty Images)

For people who follow global climate change and the efforts to stop it, one of the most encouraging developments of recent years has been the rise of industry — and especially the tech industry — as a powerful force for supporting renewables and advocating for sound climate policy. Whether it’s Google committing to buying renewables or Amazon building its own gigantic wind farm, Silicon Valley is making moves to not just disrupt technology, but upend the energy sector too.

But slowing climate change and slashing carbon emissions is just one half of the battle. With significant climate disruption already “baked in” for decades to come, it’s clear that society is going to have to learn to adapt too.

Luckily, the tech industry is getting its teeth stuck into this particular challenge too. Bloomberg BNA reported recently on an ambitious partnership between the White House and the tech industry, which is seeking to harness the vast amounts of data that exists on climate and climate impacts, and use it to create practical tools for planning and adaptation.

Dubbed Partnership for Preparedness and Resilience, the initiative has launched an online platform which will allow communities to view different data sets and use them to analyze and plan for risks such as extreme weather or rising sea levels. The platform is currently in beta form, but already a dozen communities will be testing the system out before the end of 2017.

In a joint declaration with several world governments, the World Bank, tech companies and nonprofit groups, the initiative frames their effort as a much-needed model for tighter cooperation between public and private sectors:

“The world urgently needs to collect and harness data to better understand trends and likelihoods in severe weather events as well as hydrologic, oceanic, and ecological impacts under a changing climate, and how they affect communities, cities, subnational jurisdictions, nations, and regions. We envision a world in which communities and governments at all levels have access to timely, relevant, and up-to-date information that supports management of climate variability and change.”

In terms of the efforts being undertaken, Bloomberg reports that Amazon’s cloud-computing subsidiary is releasing new data sets at no cost, while Google is helping organize priority climate data to make it easy to perform small- and large-scale analytics. Meanwhile Microsoft is working on identify data gaps and barriers.

Ultimately, the fight against climate change is not going to be one by any one technology or approach. And no single organization can take this challenge on alone. So it’s encouraging to see governments and private industries collaborating to not just develop solutions from the top down — but also to lay the groundwork for communities to start innovating on their own.

Sami Grover is a writer, and creative director at The Change Creation, a brand creation agency that works with entities who make the world better, fairer or truer. Clients include Larry’s Beans, Burt's Bees, Canaan Fair Trade and Jada Pinkett Smith/Overbrook Entertainment.