The 2020 Call For Code Global Challenge by IBM is calling on developers across the globe to find technological solutions to halt and reverse the impact of Climate Change. To extend support for the initiative, Nature inFocus is publishing a series of Climate Change stories from around the country.
Wildfires that are progressively worse each year, heatwaves and droughts that reek of permanence, cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons that engulf our shores with enraged vigour – humanity is seemingly at war with its homeland. As we step into this new decade, the climate crisis looms large, with its invisible claws tightening around our throats. We are left with no choice but to throw our full weight behind one last hurrah: “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”
The 2016 Paris Agreement brought together 196 nations to act urgently and combat climate change. Globally, leaders gave themselves benchmarks to chase and registered pledges (Nationally Determined Contribution, or NDC) that will be revised every five years. Four years later, action on the ground is yet to translate to reverse these effects. In a recent story by The Washington Post, journalists have found that close to 10 per cent of the planet has already crossed the 2°C mark.
We are past setting climate targets to chase down in another two decades. The crisis is here and now. Environmentalist George Monbiot writes in a story for The Guardian: There is no safe level of global heating: every increment kills. Maximisation is implicit in the Paris agreement: it requires governments to pursue “the highest possible ambition”.
Instead, the world’s largest economies and top greenhouse emitters like the US have initiated the process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement while tiny island nations such as Kiribati, Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands, which might disappear if the world fails to tackle the climate crisis, are calling upon the higher-emitting and slower-moving nations to start pulling their weight.
What do we need to know?
Before we solve the problem, we need to understand how global warming is already affecting us.
- As of 2018, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the highest it has been in 3 million years.
- In the same year, India emitted about 2,299 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, a five per cent increase from the previous year.
- 2016 was the warmest year with the average temperature being 1.78 °C higher than the mid-20th century average.
- The mean temperature for the subcontinent was 0.71°C higher than the average, making 2016 the warmest year for India as well.
- Globally, deforestation has been a significant factor contributing to about 11 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Between 2002 and 2018, India lost 310,624 hectares of primary forest area, thereby driving increased emissions.
- It has been estimated that global warming is responsible for about 150,000 deaths around the world, each year. In 2018, India accounted for the highest number of deaths worldwide due to climate events.
Data and Technology
For all the technological advancements in the last century, we are still incapable of predicting or judging weather patterns. We still cannot tell when the monsoons will arrive or if it will be good or fail or how severe the next cyclone or heatwave will be. With enough warning, it would be possible to prepare for the inevitable or to try and contain the damage.
We are sitting on almost 170 years of weather data. Can we build platforms where we crowdsource data points to predict things better? The more specific these platforms are, the better.
Take for example ebird.org, where millions of bird watchers around the world upload data about bird sightings. With so many records, scientists are now able to predict the rise and decline of species, their abundance in areas, and even predict where things will change.
If you look at the 'locust crisis' that took over parts of India, the Middle East and North Africa in early 2020, it was triggered by unusual rains in March and April in the southern Arabian Peninsula. Thousands of people in India have now lost their crops and livelihood because of this mass locust invasion. With a crowdsourced approach, we might be able to create platforms that can track such destructive forces and warn farmers ahead of time.
What can we do?
Quite simply, we can look around and observe the world.
We may not be able to visualise the increase in emissions or sense small variations in temperatures. But what we can see is how trees are flowering early or how local water bodies are affected by pollutants or how certain migratory bird species have lost their usual wintering grounds. Not only does this deepen our understanding of the world we live in; it also makes it possible to amass data at a large scale. Systematic observation of the world around us will provide the necessary foundation for building the right kind of technology.
The Call For Code Global Challenge provides a unique opportunity for developers to build hyper-specific applications to summarise this data and establish trends. From publicly available data to crowdsourced information through citizen science initiatives, we can come up with systems that help predict and mitigate the impacts of climate change.
If you are a developer interested in addressing some of these pressing issues, visit the Call For Code website and get started on your idea. Winners will be awarded $200,000, receive open source support from The Linux Foundation, and will get a chance to meet mentors and investors. You will find ample resources and support to see your technology come to life.
