The stakes in the fight against global warming are higher than ever, the UN’s climate science chief said recently as almost 200 countries convened to finalise a report on climate impacts that are expected to be grim. Moreover, leaving climate change unchecked could cost India $35 trillion in lost economic potential over the next 50 years, or instead, India could gain $11 trillion in economic value, finds the Deloitte Economics Institute in its report.
India can either do nothing and impose steep economic costs or lead the way on climate action. There is no reward in guessing the latter as a viable option, but how? – data-driven analytics holds the key.
To that end, environmental intelligence startup Ambee launched a geospatial intelligence platform – geospatial.ai to unleash the power of geospatial data and fight climate change. We got in touch with Madhusudan Anand, CTO and Co-founder at Ambee to understand the idea and potential behind the platform.
“When we mix geospatial data with climate, we derive a one-of-a-kind climate intelligence. From developing capabilities to quantify and assess physical and financial risks to adapting to climate change, building resiliency, and perhaps also mitigating climate change, geospatial technology is set to play a key role. Hence, we are building this platform today without which there might not be a tomorrow,” said Madhusudan.
The platform
As climate change is becoming real, companies have started calculating risks, making decisions and investing in products to adapt and minimise impacts with information-rich geospatial climate data. To their disappointment, there is a shortage of such accurate, actionable, and high-resolution data. This is where the platform comes in handy.
“We had the technology, proprietary algorithms, applied data science methods, plus we had the sensors and sources of data in place. There was a customer need and there’s a market for it. This is why we decided to build this platform,” said Madhusudan.
Geospatial.ai records information from millions of sensors and from a constellation of earth observatory satellites all the way from 1990. The AI comes in right at the start of the data pipeline in formatting scientific data, preprocessing, and extracting data from complex satellite images. AI also helps in deriving meaning from unstructured data while making long-term predictions on climate change, climate-related risks, trends, and a lot of predictive analytics all the way to the end of the century for any given location across the world.
Currently, the platform caters to various sectors including the Government – public health, energy and infrastructure, travel, education, forestry and land use, sustainability and maritime, healthcare, pharmaceutical, insurance, financial services, digital advertising, administration and research.
Platform’s USP
The platform promises to provide high-resolution geospatial data at the click of a button. It further claims to have India’s first pollen dataset covering the entire country and the globe with numerous other plus points:
- Global coverage covering over 100+ countries.
- Air quality, weather and pollen historical data – not available in a ready-to-download format anywhere else
- Data – accurate data, tested, validated and available in multiple formats of choice
- No additional processing is needed, everything is handled by the platform
- Prop Algorithm – fills in nulls, does interpolation
- Research-backed data focused on actionability, intuitiveness and information
Challenges at hand
At the moment, India is a consumer market. Most unicorns are consumer internet businesses. Geospatial data application in India has just begun and it is at a nascent stage. Many large organisations are slowly opening up to geo-targeting consumers for digital advertising and for understanding customer behaviour by virtue of the environment for demand and supply.
The only challenge is the adaptation of businesses to such newer impactful technologies since a large-scale impact is yet to be seen. The general trend is that it is picking up, accelerating and it will be a matter of time until we start using geospatial data for managing food, supply-chain, city planning, transport, land-use, energy distribution, managing emissions, climate crisis to every single decision we make as a business.
So, what we have today
“Geospatial climate intelligence will be a new form of business intelligence every business will need”
Geospatial data has been constantly evolving and with the advent of IoT, big data, processing and storage capabilities, in the last decade this evolution has been accelerating.
Governments are already using geospatial technology to build infrastructures like roads, gas pipelines, EV infrastructure and more. Now, geospatial data has made its way into agriculture. Geospatial technology enhances precision agriculture and helps map agricultural activities to weather, soil moisture or things like the growth of pests based on wind direction, topography and landscape. Businesses and industries are using spatial data with AI and ML parsing satellite data to detect the effects of climate change or extreme weather events so they derisk the effects of climate change.
Source: indiaai.gov.in
