AWS Public Sector Blog
Analyzing climate risk models on AWS to prevent future food insecurity in Nigeria
The Climate Risk Research Foundation is a nonprofit that supports data-driven climate research. Their goal is to help decision-makers identify the potential impact and magnitude of climate-related risks and develop possible mitigation strategies. I chatted with the organization’s chairman, Brendan Reilly, to learn how its Sustainable Africa Initiative (SAI) is empowering agricultural experts in Nigeria to analyze climate risk models on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to prevent future food insecurity in their local communities.
How did you get started working in the climate space?
Reilly: My journey into the climate sector began as a technology entrepreneur when I was asked to build artificial intelligence (AI) tools for extracting data from corporate sustainability and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG)-related reports. This led me to building a startup, which received funding from venture capitalists and ultimately Bloomberg. The company used climate models and socioeconomic projections to measure the potential climate-related physical and transition risks and their impact on asset values for major financial institutions like Bank of New York Mellon. Banks contemplating issuing a 30-year mortgage now need to assess whether the value of the home or building will be adversely affected in the future by flooding, sea-level rise, wildfire, or any of 39 climate-related hazards. In doing this work, I realized that data holds the key to these questions.
My entire career has been dedicated to creating AI and big data solutions that help extract these answers. In an effort to have an impact on the world using my knowledge and AI experience, I founded the Climate Risk Research Foundation to harness climate risk data for predicting future trends. With the data, climate model researchers can now predict the increase in climate-related risk on assets, companies, industries, sectors, regions, commodities, supply chains, and even society.
What’s a climate challenge that you’ve identified in the data?
Reilly: I was asked at one point to measure climate-related risks, both physical and transition, and their impact on sovereign debt. This led me to look at Nigeria and ultimately all of Africa. Nigeria is one of the largest economies in Africa. The country has more than 220 million people today, and it’s projected to grow to more than 400 million people by 2050. Nigeria is the ninth largest exporter of oil in the world. It receives more than $40 billion a year from oil, which is almost 90 percent of their export revenue. Today, billions of dollars of this export revenue goes to buying grain and wheat to feed its growing population. But as society transitions off oil, it is clear that there will be less money to buy grain and wheat, and Nigeria’s agriculture sector does not currently produce enough to meet growing demands. If you look at the analysis of where it’s going to get hotter and drier, you’ll see that climate change will have a severe impact on food security in Nigeria over time. So you’ve got two things converging—transition risk off of oil and the physical risk from climate change.
At the end of the day, if you don’t purchase or produce enough food for your population, people will starve. Today, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), 278 million Africans suffer from chronic hunger. Looking ahead to 2030, 2040, and even 2050, it’s an escalating problem where the number of Africans suffering from hunger, malnutrition, and starvation could grow to staggering numbers. Once you know the facts, the issue is how do you stand by and do nothing?
How can data help address or prevent food insecurity in Nigeria?
Reilly: I always believe that the answer is in the data. We launched the Sustainable Africa Initiative, which helps African nations identify and measure the physical and transition risks associated with climate change. With the help of AWS, we are now bringing the tools, data, and analytics that big banks on Wall Street use to analyze investments to places where they haven’t been readily available before.
Instead of starting with governments or businesses, we’ve started by building capacity at 10 leading universities in Nigeria that have agricultural studies programs and run hackathons. The students compete by conducting analyses on Nigeria’s food crops and by developing adaptation and mitigation strategies on how to build resilience in Nigeria’s agricultural sector. We are not trying to impose our thoughts on Africa or tell them what they should be doing. We’re sharing tools, access to data and climate models, and the training needed so they can calculate and understand local risks and develop their own adaptation and mitigation strategies.
After a hackathon, the results are analyzed by a committee of field experts, and the winner receives a $10,000 prize. We will launch a similar challenge in Kenya soon and will continue to build on the infrastructure of the former analysis. The data and models from the challenges will be made available to the public from the Sustainable Africa Initiative data exchange hosted on the AWS Cloud in South Africa.
How did you decide to work with universities instead of governments or businesses?
Reilly: I was speaking at COP 27, and there were two young Nigerian climate scientists in the audience. One of them came up and showed me a geospatial mapping application on his phone where he was doing a flood risk analysis of Nigeria. It was amazing. The two were young, passionate, and understood the size and scope of the problem. They believed they could work with scientists in other universities to try and solve the problem collectively. That’s how we decided.
Also, more than 80 percent of the farms in Nigeria are small family farms, and it’s really hard to get to them. The students are part of the community, so there’s already outreach built into the agricultural sector. We picked universities in all six agricultural sectors in Nigeria to have the biggest impact.
How is AWS supporting the solution?
Reilly: Through AWS Promotional Credit, AWS provides Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) access to the 10 universities so they can run risk and climate models on the agricultural sector in Nigeria. They use data specific to Nigeria’s agriculture from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that’s stored in Open Data on AWS.
In addition, large Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets store geospatial imagery and make it possible to perform analytics to identify where exactly in Nigeria the problems arise, and how to potentially mitigate and adapt their agricultural sector to meet the growing demands of Nigeria.
You mentioned, “The answer is in the data.” Will you elaborate on what you mean by that?
Reilly: You can predict when certain challenges will occur and where will they occur—whether that’s flooding or drought or wind. We can begin to understand what hazards might happen in each future year.
For example, if the data shows that drought is likely to occur in an area and you’re growing rice, which requires a lot of water per acre, you may want to transition to corn. And you can transition to seed that is more resilient to drought. It might be more expensive, but mitigating risk and adapting to drought will improve resilience and crop production. There are many ways to transition to more sustainable farming. The goal is to use data and outreach to gain the knowledge and to disseminate the sustainable farming strategies that may allow Nigeria to improve its agriculture sector and ultimately meet the demand of its growing population.
This data is crucial for measuring climate-related risks and for developing adaptation and mitigation strategies. The truth is, without proactive measures, there will not be enough food to feed the country. I believe that the success of the Sustainable Africa Initiative can be quantified by the number of lives saved.
What’s on the horizon for you and the Sustainable Africa Initiative?
Reilly: We will be focused on gathering the data, building out the tools, and making them available from an Africa-hosted Climate Risk Data Exchange. We will also be working closely with the Tony Elumelu Foundation in Africa to disseminate climate risk data, as well as adaptation and sustainable farming strategies to 500,000 agriculture-focused entrepreneurs and business owners across all 54 African nations.
In addition, we will launch Climate Risk Research Challenges in five leading universities in Kenya and plan to make all of our resources available for free throughout Africa so different communities have the opportunity to take advantage of the SAI tools, data, and infrastructure to perform their own risk analysis and build adaptation strategies for their own countries.
To learn more about the Sustainable Africa Initiative, watch the Sustainable Africa Initiative overview video. To learn how to use AWS to optimize your research for open science, reach out to your AWS account team or contact us to learn more.