Hello and welcome to the Strawman - the daily climate newsletter that’s got your back like a dining table chair.

If you sang the title, shame on you - this is serious stuff. Today’s we’re talking about unprecedented wildfires in Canada and Russia - like a broken record, scientists are sounding the alarm once again.

Firing Up

At the Strawman, we’re not really in the business of crying fire. But the reality is, some of this stuff is too hard to ignore.

Wildfires in Canada and Russia’s northern boreal forests are rising sharply, reducing air quality and putting tons of CO2 in to the earth’s atmosphere.

In Canada, wildfires this year have burned over a million acres and forced 30K+ people to evacuate in the last week alone. They’ve also forced some of Canada’s biggest oil and gas companies to shut down their operations. We know how it sounds but it’s still not a good thing.

These sorts of fire occur often in the Spring but the intensity and average temperature of these fires is much higher than before. Prior to the wildfire, almost 50% of Alberta, the impacted Canadian state, was suffering from drought. This isn’t it though, it’s expected that fires like this will emit more than 12GT of CO2 before 2050 from North America alone. Those are some serious numbers.

Big Data for Big Problems

A new wave of startups has been focused on tackling the behemoth that is forest fires. This week, risk-modelling startup Mitiga announced that it raised $14.4m of new funding.

Mitiga works with larges businesses such as asset managers and power generation companies to bring AI and high performance compute to better predict climate risks. And you guessed it, to mitigate those risks. They’re bringing together all the good stuff to predict, and then fight, all the bad stuff.

Mitiga argues that previous approaches to risk were too focused on historical data and projecting out what was expected to happen. The problem with this approach is that these events, by definition, are outliers. Mitiga is aiming to get much better live data by focusing in on specific climate risks and locations and modelling these out using a physics based system.

Yep, they said let the smart folks handle it. Armed with PhDs, Mitiga believes that their approach can save billions of dollars of climate impact by informing interventions, incentives, and evacuations.

Climate risk, specifically those in forest fires, have grown uncontrollably large over the last decade. It’s imperative for us tackle these challenges, let’s hope that technology can play its part.

Until next time,

The Strawman