Beating Climate Change: Developer’s Edition

Climate change is one of the greatest threats to mankind. Rising global temperatures, rising sea level, destruction of glaciers and arctic ice, and the natural calamities are extremely severe these days. The signs are hard to ignore. We, as developers, have the capability to use technology to help in the global fight against climate change. Today, let’s look at some of the areas where help is needed and how platforms such as the Call for Code initiative help us to bring our solutions to the world.

Regions of Interest

Everyone has a role to play. Industries and corporations are looking for sustainable processes. Scientists and researchers are looking to find cleaner sources of energy, and trying to find out more efficient ways to use the renewable sources.

 Many governments have started to implement policies which help the nation reduce their carbon footprints. So, we as independent developers can focus on our strengths and help in bringing out solutions which align with one or more of the verticals we just discussed.

Coming back to the Call for Code Initiative I mentioned earlier, it is a global challenge which helps developers like us to form teams and build solutions that help fight climate change. And the industries who support it, like IBM , will help the best idea to be implemented and ensure that it helps people in need.So, there are a few high impact areas where we will focus on building solutions.

1.Water Sustainability

Water scarcity has become a major problem in many parts of the world. One of the basic needs for survival has been threatened. We need to help in identifying wastage, finding out better; more sustainable water saving processes. Use cases can range from smart irrigation using scalable IoT platforms such as the IBM Cloud IoT platform, to AI driven water planning solutions. 

2. Energy Sustainability

With more data being available in the public domain, we can contribute by building applications which use machine learning to predict and simulate sustainable energy solutions. For example, using weather data from open sources to locate a region suitable to be a wind farm. We can use forecasting to see if that wind farm can sustainably generate electricity over the years.

3. Disaster Resiliency

My interest in building solutions revolve around this topic. Disasters are extremely devastating these days. The number of people who are displaced or the toll it takes on communities is unfathomable. The solutions built in this domain ensures that people get immediate help or relief. Disasters cannot be predicted, however based on our experience, we can be prepared.

My Opinion on Call For Code 

Being a part of Call for Code has shown me how solutions get implemented and help people fight the climate change crisis. So, it’s not just another hackathon. It’s more than that.. 

I’ve witnessed the ideas from previous years built and deployed to places where it mattered the most. Secondly, the whole initiative pushes for open source technology. Open Source has always helped in achieving a higher reach all around the world. Implementing an idea is one thing but it’s a whole different thing to ensure that an idea can be applied anywhere, by anyone and not really tied down by legalities of an intellectual property.

Organisations like IBM are supporting this by opening up their cloud platform with AI, and compute capability for developers to build and test their solution. They are helping in providing their expertise in building an open source based solution, and most importantly, it’s a global initiative. 

So, I hope that you work towards implementing the idea you have to help fight climate change. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.