Alphabet has just uncovered their latest project, and it’s fantastic news for climate activists. Project Bellwether promises to predict natural disasters and guide the National Guard towards timely and effective response.

X, the moonshot-focused arm of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has developed AI to identify critical infrastructure damage caused by natural disasters and deliver relief to those affected. It seeks to minimise the time from the disaster to the recovery efforts starting.

According to X, the current National Guard system is manual and time-consuming, so relief and repair efforts sometimes don’t arrive until days after an event.

Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters. They then have to correlate those images to surrounding infrastructure, label all the relevant features, and only then can highlight the significant damage and send it forward to first responder teams.

Col. Brian McGarry, Division Chief – Operations, Plans, and Training, National Guard

Bellwether’s AI will combine geospatial data with machine learning to analyse imagery and identify disaster-affected areas in seconds. This data already exists in numerous satellites and other technology around the world, but Bellwether will aggregate it for the first time.

A key use case for this technology is identifying damaged critical infrastructure so repairs can be made immediately. This is expected to drastically reduce the number of lives lost to natural disasters.

In five years, nobody should have to wait to understand the extent of extreme weather damage and the community’s most urgent needs. It should be seen as reasonable and expected that we immediately know the state of the most important infrastructure across a landscape, and what to do next.

Sarah Russell, Managing Director, Bellwether