Climate and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Harnessing the Whole of Government to Improve Climate Resiliency

Global economic losses from weather events like storms, floods, droughts and wildfires have grown more costly over the past decade, with global weather damages totaling ~$2.5 trillion between 2011 and 2020, up almost 50 percent from the 2001-2010 figure. Data fusion, predictive analytics of agency and commercially-available earth observation data sets, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are needed for climate mitigation, adaptation, and resiliency efforts. U.S. government agencies face increasing pressure to harness the power of large data sets to drive, produce different, better, faster mission outcomes as it relates to climate. Booz Allen Hamilton asked the Capstone team to explore the following: 

• Where is there opportunity to fuse diverse data from disparate sources and use AI/ML to create a systems view of several climate issues, as well as develop the business case to create an open platform that can ingest data quickly, across multiple formats, and help government policy makers make better decisions?
• What policy actions need to be considered in taking the ‘whole of government’ approach to dealing with climate change?