Tag: climate resilience

Climate risk consists of transition risk and physical risk. Transition risk represents regulatory and market-based risks while physical climate risk covers climate-related earth processes and its effects on the built and natural environment. In this blog post, we highlight how to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enrich your asset portfolio with open climate data hosted in AWS.

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.

This year’s cohort of nonprofit winners of the Imagine Grant represents the biggest group of winners out of a record number of applications, each exhibiting a commitment to innovation and an insistence on the highest standards for the mission areas they serve. For the first time, this year’s Imagine Grant offered two distinct award categories, inviting nonprofits of all sizes to put forward both advanced technical projects in the Go Further, Faster award category and foundational IT projects in the Momentum to Modernize award category.

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.

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.