Wildfires, Climate & Food

Athena Intelligence
2 min readJul 16, 2024

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Wildfires as a Harvest Event

Agriculture sits at the nexus of environmental data and business decisions. It was among the first industries where ESG was enforced, as the public became aware of toxic pesticides, fertilizer runoff and food safety.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the world is changing and weather volatility is accelerating. Athena Intelligence has been using data to provide insight into the smallest changes in variability of the conditions which impact harvests across entire landscapes for years.

July 15, 2024 — A temporal dynamic weather pattern started this July after the first significant summer season 2024 heatwave in late June. But soon after, the general pattern shifted into a stable one, inducing a prolonged heatwave across a portion of the continent. Temperatures are on the increase and are forecast to climb further this week. https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/summer-season-2024-historic-heatwave-balkans-eastern-europe-mk/

Athena Intelligence (website AthenaIntel.io) is a data vendor and uses data to help humans understand what the terrain would say if it could speak. The Voice of the Acre® is an algorithm which is designed to help humans understand the raw data of the land.

There are many technologies collecting information about land conditions, and many researchers, government entities and academic institutions looking at aspects of this … but to put this information together into a format useful for business decisions requires a great deal of expense and effort. Athena’s core mission is to make it as easy to get the essential information of the land as doing a BI query or a Google search.

Although originally optimized to help specialty food processors with forward contracting decisions and logistics planning, the model was optimized during 2019–2020 shutdown for wildfire risk projection.

Wildfires as a Harvest Event

The same factors that drive anxiety about crop failures — excessive heat, unusual rain patterns, severe weather (hurricanes, tornadoes, hailstorms and flooding) are the sources of natural catastrophes.

Athena currently focuses exclusively on wildfires. Specifically, where is the land predisposed to host a catastrophic wildfire. Using conditional profiles of the land, and historic fires in the bioregion (as opposed to simulations), Athena put a probability of a wildfire for the next 12 months on each location.

Clients include insurance, electric utilities, communities and financial services companies, where Athena’s geospatial intelligence incorporated into wildfire mitigation plans (WMP) and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP), property insurance underwriting and portfolio risk optimization.

Reach out to us at Info@Project-Athena.com and follow us on LinkedIn

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Athena Intelligence

Athena Intelligence weaves vast amounts of disaggregated environmental data. Drop us a line (Info@Project-Athena.com), or visit www.athenaintel.io