Tag: climate change

Since wildfires can double in size and intensity every three to five minutes, early detection and reduced response times are essential. Cloud technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), can help with this. Learn a high-level architecture to create a solution with AWS that uses AI to identify and classify wildfire smoke imagery and then rapidly alert and inform first responders about the location and condition of a fire incident.

AWS announced the 2023 cohort of the Halcyon Climate Resilience in Latin America and the Caribbean Fellowship. AWS is sponsoring this fellowship with Halcyon, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit supporting impact-driven startups, to accelerate solutions that address the compounding effects of climate change. The focus of this fellowship is to help 10 innovative startups address the intersection of climate change and social determinants of health to provide more equitable health and life outcomes.

Climate change is a significant factor in many health-related issues, from the increase of pest-related illness, to food scarcity, access to clean air and water, and beyond. Recognizing the power the cloud has to amplify technologies that mitigate many of these issues, AWS is sponsoring a new fellowship with Halcyon, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit supporting impact-driven startups. Designed for entrepreneurs seeking to build climate resilience across Latin America and the Caribbean, the Halcyon Climate Resilience Intensive Fellowship aims to combat the compounding effects of climate change on poverty, food insecurity, health disparities, and displacement.

The First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research and technology group, is committed to making climate risk information accessible, simple to understand, and actionable for individuals, governments, and industry. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Dr. Ed Kearns, the chief data officer of First Street Foundation, to share how AWS technologies and open data are supporting their mission to provide accurate and up-to-date information on climate related risks.

The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Invest in our planet.” In celebration of this year’s theme, we want to highlight the important sustainability work featured in the AWS documentary series, Climate Next, which explores the ways organizations and communities in four distinct regions are investing in cloud-powered solutions to fight climate change.

In Africa, scientific data is critical to helping the nation’s leaders tackle issues like water scarcity and climate change. A collaboration between nonprofit Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) is helping them access the data they need. DE Africa operates a free and user-friendly Earth observation (EO) data service that provides African policymakers with insights into a range of challenges, from natural resource management to the impacts of climate change. The service has already helped Ghanaian officials identify and tackle illegal mining, and provided decision-ready insights on flooding and drought in Tanzania and Nigeria.

The new four-part documentary series Climate Next from Amazon explores how governments and organizations around the world use cloud technology from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive innovation in response to our changing planet, create scalable solutions to address climate change, and empower communities to protect and preserve our planet. One episode of the series showcases how the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico uses cloud technology to create a more efficient waste and recycling management operation to divert waste from landfills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Companies and asset managers looking to protect their financial investments from climate change-related risks, and invest in more sustainable solutions, can now access a new dataset on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to help inform their decision making. Amazon announced that the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) dataset is now available and free for anyone to access in the cloud. The dataset includes key reference information that supports clear and unique identification of legal entities participating in financial transactions, and each LEI contains information about an entity’s ownership structure, including ‘who is who’ and ‘who owns whom’.

Soon to be located at Amazon’s Arlington, Virginia Headquarters (HQ2), the AWS Innovation Studio will serve as a center for scaling the impact our customers can have on improving the communities in which we live, work, and learn. Together, public sector organizations, policy makers, citizens, industry leaders, and academia will collaborate with Amazon experts at the AWS Innovation Studio to find new ways to address some of the world’s most pressing societal issues such as housing insecurity, climate change, sustainability, and education inequality.

Unravelling the relationship between COVID-19 and air pollution is vital for protecting public health. For example, preliminary works suggest that those living in environments with polluted air are significantly more likely to be adversely affected by COVID-19. At the same time, air pollution is already known to cause an estimated one out of every eight deaths globally. The decrease in human activities due to COVID-19 lockdowns across the world has people wondering how air pollution levels are being impacted—and what valuable public health and policy lessons we can learn.