Earth Knowledge Expands Capacity to Scale Global Change Software Solutions As Part of the White House OSTP Launch of Public-Private Partnership to Help Communities Bridge Gap Between Climate Data and Resiliency Planning
New York, NY (PRWEB) September 22, 2016 -- Earth Knowledge, global environmental IT leader, broadened its reach in providing software solutions for global change today as The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and World Resources Institute launched the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP) to help communities, companies, and investors use data to manage their understanding and planning for climate resilience. The partnership is announced at a time when climate change has emerged over the last few years to top the lists of many of the world’s most influential organizations as the top threat to global stability and security.
PREP collaborating partners working on platform development include WRI, NASA, NOAA, U.S. Department of the Interior, Amazon Web Services, CARTO, Descartes Labs, Earth Knowledge, Esri, Google Cloud Platform, Google Earth Engine, the Sonoma County Resilience Team, and Vizzuality. Additional working group collaborators include Earth Science Information Partners, Future Earth, Group on Earth Observations, Microsoft, and IBM.
Earth Knowledge has a long and accomplished history of innovation with industry and community leaders at the forefront of some of the most imperative global change challenges related to Agriculture, Water, Land, Climate, and Health. As part of their participation in the partnership Earth Knowledge has spotlighted their client Sonoma County that has been at the forefront of the Climate Change Resilience dialog for many years and has been recognized as a White House Climate Champion.
“Earth Knowledge is both a founding member of PREP and the Sonoma County Climate Resilience Team,” says Earth Knowledge, CEO, Julia Armstrong D’Agnese. “As a technology company, we see PREP bringing order to some of the chaos of disparate environmental data and tools by providing integrated government agency data, and integrated dashboard tools that communities world-wide can select from and customize for their own needs. From the perspective of the Engaged Community with Sonoma County, PREP facilitates isolated global communities to learn from each other and provide a way to bring valuable information from many different organizations together for decision-making potentially saving lives, resources, and costs.”
“Earth Knowledge sees involvement in PREP as an important part of our portfolio of platform-agnostic computing technology, formalized processes for business and community leaders, and key relationships with technical experts upon which to massively scale carefully architected global change solutions”, says Earth Knowledge President and CTO, Dr. Frank A. D’Agnese. “PREP provides a critical foundation for communities and whole regions to learn from one another. Earth Knowledge’s work with Sonoma County is an important use case providing real world solutions from a premier global wine region and how its approaches can be coupled with valuable practices in a premier coffee region in Colombia and transferred to other parts of the world.”
Sonoma County Water Agency General Manager, Grant Davis, said, "Earth Knowledge has been a tremendous resource to our Sonoma County Climate Resilience Team as we developed our PREP beta dashboard. Earth Knowledge provided the resources necessary to pull together our regional climate risk data into one single online dashboard that will benefit our community and others around the world for years to come."
Sonoma County Water Agency Chairman Efren Carrillo stated, “Sonoma County is in the midst of experiencing climate change and that means higher temperatures, more extreme rainfall events, and prolonged droughts. The Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness has helped our community work together and integrate climate risk data into one central online tool that is available to our whole community. Before PREP, this data had no single home; instead it was fragmented amongst our government agencies and community organizations. Our urban planners, farmers and community now have the ability to plan for the future with this critical PREP climate resiliency tool. PREP partners, including Earth Knowledge, have provided the technical assistance and vision to help our team make PREP a reality in Sonoma County.”
“Understanding the threats posed by climate change and extreme weather are critical to protecting people, homes, businesses and livelihoods. Data can be part of the solution,” said Janet Ranganathan, Vice President for Science and Research, WRI. “PREP will leverage open data and open-source computing to build resilience planning across the globe by connecting those making decisions with the data they need, in a format they can use. Harnessing the data revolution to improve climate resilience will only be possible with collaborative partnerships across government, civil society, the private sector, and community organizations.”
Janet Ranganathan, WRI V.P. continues, “It was great having Earth Knowledge join the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (“PREP”) as a founding member. They played a key role building a bridge to the pioneering resilience work of the Sonoma County Climate Resilience Team as well as planners working in the community of Caldas in Colombia. Together with Sonoma County and others, Earth Knowledge played a critical role ensuring that the beta platform was co-designed, and co-created by the community decision-makers that it seeks to support.”
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About Earth Knowledge
Earth Knowledge, a global environmental information technology leader headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, provides software solutions for global change to business and governmental agencies to maximize operational efficiency, profits, and mitigate costs and risks in the areas of agriculture, water, land, climate and health. Earth Knowledge decision tools have been used in 80% of countries of the world. (http://www.earthknowledge.net)
Contact: Julia Armstrong D’Agnese julia(at)earthknowledge(dot)net (520) 829-7127
About Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP)
WRI, NASA, NOAA, U.S. Department of the Interior, Amazon Web Services, CARTO, Descartes Labs, Earth Knowledge, Esri, Google Cloud Platform, Google Earth Engine and Vizzuality. Additional working group collaborators include Earth Science Information Partners, Future Earth, Group on Earth Observations, Microsoft and IBM. (http://www.prepdata.org)
About Sonoma County Climate Resilience Team
The SCCRT is a Sonoma County public-private coalition that includes the Sonoma County Water Agency, Sonoma County Regional Climate Protection Authority, Pepperwood Foundation, Sonoma Ecology Center, United States Geological Survey, and Earth Knowledge. The Sonoma County Climate Resilience Team is an internationally recognized public-private coalition accelerating local climate action across sectors and creating a transferable model that can be scaled for communities worldwide.
About World Resources Institute
WRI is a global research organization that spans more than 50 countries, with offices in the United States, China, India, Brazil, and more. Our more than 550 experts and staff work closely with leaders to turn big ideas into action at the nexus of environment, economic opportunity and human well-being (http://www.wri.org).
Julia Armstrong D'Agnese, Earth Knowledge, Inc., +1 (520) 481-1793, [email protected]
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