The Foresight Project is a cutting-edge climate intelligence and analytics platform. It is designed to help combat climate change and help society adapt in an efficient and sustainable way. The platform will generate projections of river behaviour, storm risk, and flood risk, at suitable resolutions for industrial application. Through this approach, clients will be able to query the impact of climate change on existing and future infrastructure developments. This will enable them to gain a better understanding of climate risk on their projects.
By combining efficient and flexible machine learning methods with the blockchain user interface and interpretability features, Foresight can rapidly generate projections for a wide range of scenarios, whilst reducing the technical barriers to using its projections and further enabling decision-making processes.
The interaction with the Climate Intelligence platform will enable the end-user to obtain high resolution temporal and spatial datasets, given the location and time period of interest. These will be extracted using an intuitive interface, with various options for presenting the information graphically and generating risk reports., The end-user can utilise the data immediately without additional technical hurdles. For example, a projection of potential storms affecting the UK in the year 2059, along with their likelihoods, or the chances of a specific river’s flow exceeding a threshold every winter period from 2040-2060 for insurers or developers anticipating risk to newbuild houses in that river’s floodplain.
Partners
British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Artificial Intelligence Lab, and the Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Risk CDT (University of Cambridge)
BAS Artificial Intelligence Lab is a cross-disciplinary group of researchers leading in the application of AI and Data Science methods to advance environmental science. It is led by Dr Scott Hosking who is also a Co-Director of the AI for Environmental Risk CDT based in Cambridge. Central to both institutions’ research is the application of probabilistic machine learning methods to large spatiotemporal environmental datasets, providing robust estimates of climate impact uncertainty; both will act as academic partners to the project.
Mott MacDonald
Mott MacDonald is the industrial partners to the project. As the largest employee-owned civil engineering company in the world, the various teams at Mott MacDonald have extensive experience across multiple disciplines, including hydrology, water resources, climate resilience, and infrastructure development and management. With regards to the project, they have provided valuable insights and will pilot the technology in real-world test scenarios, showcasing its industrial and commercial potential.