It's not just floods and fires: This AI forecasts how climate change w
source link: https://www.fastcompany.com/90789292/its-not-just-floods-and-fires-this-ai-forecasts-how-climate-change-will-impact-your-city
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
It’s not just floods and fires: This AI forecasts how climate change will impact your city
Climate Alpha is a new platform that uses algorithms to determine how cities will transform in the face of climate change.
If you buy a house in Miami or Phoenix in 2022, what will it be worth in five years or ten years as climate change progresses? A new tech platform, Climate Alpha, uses a “scenario forecaster” to help answer that question—and to help predict where it might make sense to invest instead.
“We’re blending the entire history of the American modern property market with climate modeling,” says Parag Khanna, founder and CEO of Climate Alpha. While other tools exist to look at climate risk by location, the startup saw the need to look at a more complex picture. How are cities adapting and investing in infrastructure to protect against climate impacts? Where are jobs growing? Where are people moving now, despite extreme heat or wildfires or sea level rise?
[Image: Climate Alpha]Khanna started working on the company while writing Move: The Forces Uprooting Us, a book exploring how people will migrate because of climate change, political upheaval, jobs, and other forces. “The point of the book was not to dwell on where people will leave,” he says. “I was undertaking what I think of as an as an ethical challenge to figure out where the human population can sustainably and equitably reside, as climate change and other conditions deteriorate over the next 10, 20, 30 years, at a scale of billions of people.”
Governments can also use the tools to help plan where to invest for climate migration, and where to encourage people to move. “My belief is that we should use this technology to identify those locations that meet the criteria for livability—affordability, space, lower cost, building zero energy homes, high share of renewable energy in the grid, clean air, and proximity to certain infrastructure—and to ‘pre-design’ the settlement of the future.”
Recommend
About Joyk
Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK