Mapping the way to climate resilience

This paper highlights collaborative work on the mapping of climate change issues. AT&T is taking action with its Climate Resilience Project, using spatial data analysis and location information to tackle the complex problem of how increasingly powerful storms could affect infrastructure such as cell towers and the telecom’s ability to deliver service to its customers. To better understand its vulnerability, AT&T collaborated with the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. Their joint mission was to identify risks to the company’s infrastructure and real estate based on historical weather events and predictive modeling.

Key takeaways:

1. As the deleterious effects of climate change threaten to disrupt business globally, plans to counter them are making their way into corporate agendas.
2. Case in point: telecom AT&T is using spatial data analysis and location information to determine the impact of worsening storms on its service-delivery infrastructure such as cell towers, cables, and servers.
3. The visualization and analysis of spatial data, referred to as location intelligence, help humans see problems in new ways, especially when combined with the processing power and speed of artificial intelligence tools.