09/12/2024
The 2019–20 Black Summer in Australia was a catastrophic event that is imprinted on our collective psyche. Mega fires destroyed over 3,000 homes, displaced tens of thousands of people and burned over 19 million hectares of land. Thirty-three people lost their lives. It’s estimated the fires killed billions of native animals.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) states that our Black Summer was not an aberration, but a continuation of fire trends beginning more than two decades ago, and that human-induced climate change is creating ever more dangerous conditions for fires in Australia.
Extreme weather events such as heat waves, bushfires, droughts, cyclones, hurricanes, severe storms, torrential rain, catastrophic flooding and rising sea levels are having a devastating impact on people and ecosystems around the world.
Despite Australia’s history of drought, fire and flooding rains, extreme weather events are intensifying and becoming more frequent. For example, Brisbane was flooded due to a weather event that dumped 400–1100 millimetres of rain from February 23 to 27, 2022. Lismore, in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales (NSW) had the highest flood on record on February 28, 2022, when the flood level reached 14.4 metres and displaced most of the community.⁵ A week later, Ballina in northern NSW had a one-in-500-year flood event. Thousands of people were left homeless by these devastating floods.
The climate crisis is the most pressing global problem of our time as carbon pollution heats the planet to dangerous levels causing oceans to warm, coral reefs to die, Arctic ice and Antarctic glaciers to melt, and forests to burn. According to a study published in Nature in July 2023, heatwaves across Europe in the summer of 2022 killed 61,000 people.
When it was confirmed that July 2023 had become the hottest month in the past 120,000 years, the Secretary General of the United Nations declared:
“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”
If we do not take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we can expect to see more extreme weather events, more deaths especially from heatstroke, rising sea levels and flooding of cities like Bangkok, Kolkata, Jakarta, Dhaka, Shanghai, Miami, New York City, New Orleans, Venice, Amsterdam and others. Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is already sinking due to rising sea levels. The Indonesian government is moving the capital over 1,000 kilometres away to Borneo. Pacific Island nations like Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tuvalu and others are also at risk of being submerged due to sea level rises caused by the climate crisis.
Google Research’s AI-powered flood forecasting model can provide critical early warnings for natural disasters, potentially saving lives and mitigating damage by harnessing real-time data, historical patterns and advanced algorithms. The Flood Hub (g.co/floodhub) makes this vital information accessible to a wide range of stakeholders.
Google is leveraging its satellite technology and AI capabilities to combat wildfires aka bushfires. Through initiatives like FireSat, they’re developing a constellation of satellites designed to detect wildfires as small as a classroom, significantly improving early detection capabilities. This enables quicker response times, potentially preventing large-scale destruction and loss of life.
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