Tag: climate change

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.

The world’s forests have decreased by nearly half since the onset of human civilization. Deforestation is continuing at a high rate due to agricultural pressure, poor land management, and climate change, which increases drought, disease, and invasive species. But a new generation of technologies is transforming our ability to manage and grow forests. The unprecedented level of data enables ecology-trained artificial intelligence (AI) to inventory the ecosystem and identify problems like plant condition stress, invasive weeds, species decline, and erosion. Learn how Dendra Systems is using the cloud to restore ecosystems around the world.

For climate change adaptation and resilience, it is important to assess the risks associated with the impacts of climate change and then understand and take action to mitigate those risks. Since 1980, the U.S. has experienced 258 weather and climate disasters where the overall damage costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. As floods become more frequent and costly and natural hazards and climate change impact physical building assets, business continuity, and asset values, big data and analytical technology can be used to create high-tech risk assessments and economic loss estimations.

The climate data factory is a French startup working on making future climate information easily accessible. The team believes that easy access to actionable data of future climate conditions is essential to fight climate change. Read on for the Q&A with Dr. Harilaos Loukos of the climate data factory on how we can best make use of data.