Team profile by Margaret Brooks, Francesca Chiappetta, Alex Desbans, Neel Gajjar, Julia Kourelakos, Saad Lahrichi, Vaishvi Patel, Ruixin Zhang, Ruohan Zhang, Shufan Xia, Jordan Malof and Kyle Bradbury

Climate change is beginning to impact infrastructure, transportation, energy, food and water supplies and human health across the globe, with Africa and Asia being two of the most vulnerable regions to the impacts of global warming. However, these impacts are often difficult to quantify, especially in parts of the Global South where ground-based economic surveys occur infrequently. In regions with incomplete information and knowledge gaps in the strategies needed to adapt to the impacts of climate change, some of the most vulnerable cities incur increased risk of disastrous impacts. 

Informing climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies involves a wide-ranging quantity of data. This requires information on energy infrastructure and access, population, income, demand growth trends, agriculture and land use as well as on vulnerable infrastructure such as transmission lines, water systems and food supply chains. To make the best possible plans and track policy progress and impacts, these data need to be regularly monitored.

This project team worked to democratize access to climate change data and the strategies to acquire those data. Team members developed and publicly released a dataset to create a geospatial foundation model for enabling near real-time tracking of climate change causes and impacts. 

This model enhances climate change mitigation/adaptation monitoring and planning through developing robust features that can be used to monitor a broad range of contributing factors (e.g., energy infrastructure and use, agricultural activity) and impacts (e.g., economic impacts and human migration). This advancement can provide evidence for decision-makers to inform climate mitigation and adaptation strategies and hasten those strategies’ evaluation and implementation.

Tracking Climate Change Using Satellites and Artificial Intelligence

Poster by Shufan Xia, Frankie Chiappetta, Margaret Brooks, Alex Desbans, Neel Gajjar, Jules Kourelakos, Saad Lahrichi, Vaishvi Patel, Ada Zhang, Edna Zhang, Kyle Bradbury and Jordan Malof