The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies, has launched a new Theme Group to address the increasing prevalence and severity of disasters natural with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
In close collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the new theme group will support global efforts to improve understanding, modeling and management of natural hazards and disasters through AI and will create a roadmap for international action.
The first work meeting of the group was held from Monday to Wednesday of this week and it laid the foundations for what will be the work of this new alliance.
"With new data and new knowledge comes new predictive powers that can save countless lives," said ITU Secretary General Houlin Zhao. "This new Focus Group aims to ensure that AI achieves its extraordinary potential to accelerate the innovation needed to address the greatest challenges facing humanity," he noted.
Increasingly frequent disasters
Over the past 50 years, more than 11,000 disasters have been attributed to weather, climate and water-related hazards, resulting in 2 million deaths and economic losses from value of 3.6 trillion dollars. Although the average number of registered deaths from each disaster has been reduced by a third during this period, the number of registered disasters has multiplied by five and the economic losses have multiplied by seven, according to the report 'The state of the services WMO Climate Changes 2020'.
The driver of this increase is climate change, which has made extreme weather and climate events more frequent, more intense, and more severe, disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities. At the same time, one in three people is still not adequately covered by early warning systems.
In 2018, around 108 million people worldwide needed help from the international humanitarian system as a result of storms, floods, droughts and wildfires. By 2030, it is estimated that this number could increase by almost 50% at a cost of around $20 billion a year, says the WMO report.
“AI has the potential to help all countries make breakthroughs in disaster management that will leave no one behind,” said Jürg Luterbacher, WMO Chief Scientist and Director of Science and Innovation.
“The WMO Disaster Risk Reduction Program helps countries protect lives, livelihoods and property from natural hazards, and is strengthening weather support to humanitarian operations for disaster preparedness through the development of a WMO coordination mechanism and a global multi-hazard warning system. In this Focus Group, our goal is to promote knowledge transfer, communication and education, all with a focus on regions where resources are limited," Luterbacher noted.
Thus, the group will pay special attention to the needs of vulnerable regions with limited resources. It will make a special effort to support the participation of countries that have proven to be the most affected by natural disasters, in particular small island developing States and least developed countries.
AI to fight climate change
AI is increasingly important to the work of WMO. Supercomputers crunch petabytes of data to forecast the weather around the world. The agency also coordinates a global program of observations from the surface and by satellite. Their models combine data from more than 30 satellite sensors, weather stations, and ocean observation platforms around the globe.
The WMO Information System (WIS) acts as a one stop shop for all activities related to data management. AI can help interpret the resulting data and help forecasters make decisions already given an overwhelming amount of data and can help recognize where a serious event might be or is at risk of one.
“However, AI is not a magic formula to replace models based on physical understanding and decades of research on atmosphere-ocean interactions. And for AI to thrive, data must be open, available and interoperable,” Anthony Rea, director of the WMO Department of Infrastructure, said at the meeting.