The Golden Age Of Geography

Enterprise Tech The Golden Age Of Geography Jack Dangermond Contributor Esri Contributor Group Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Sep 15, 2022, 04:20pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin After several years of devastating and expensive weather-related disasters, AT&T committed to enhancing the resilience of its cellular, telephone, and internet network. Just two years of damage from 2016 to 2018 had cost the company $800 million to repair.

And it wasn’t just the cost. Cellular and internet networks have become part of the essential infrastructure of the US. Losing them anytime is crippling; all the more-so when they are knocked out during a natural disaster when people need them to save lives and get in touch with the people they love.

Shouldn’t there be a way to use cutting-edge technology to protect all that cutting-edge technology? AT&T teamed up with climate scientists and engineers at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory to undertake a unique pilot project: AT&T wanted to look into the future and map the flood and high-speed wind risk across four states in the southeastern US that had been hit hard by hurricanes—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In order to be actionable, the climate and storm risks needed to be modeled with incredible specificity, 60 times higher resolution than existing maps. How high might the water get in an area with critical infrastructure? How likely was this hazard to occur? How often? Could we get the resolution down to nearly 1/10th of a mile? Could we project out to 30 years from now? The result was a climate dataset equal to 500 billion pages of text, which Argonne and AT&T turned into maps — a dynamic look at the future, and the projected risk in that future.

Then AT&T layered in its vital infrastructure, its buildings, cell towers, cables, and equipment to see which parts of the network were most at risk, and what kind of risk. This enabled AT&T not just to see the future, but to change it. To see where it needs to harden that network, to protect critical facilities, and make smarter decisions about where to build new ones.

MORE FOR YOU The 5 Biggest Technology Trends In 2022 ‘Enthusiastic Entrepreneurs’: Pre-IPO Statements On Profitability Prove To Be Larger Than Real Life The 7 Biggest Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trends In 2022 The effort let AT&T ask questions it couldn’t ask before — and see the answers, in advance. On one level, it looks like AT&T and Argonne made some new maps. What they really did is think in a whole new way: They thought about AT&T’s physical network, its responsibility to the community, and how to visualize geographical areas that are at risk.

Geography is a way of pulling all key information together. It shows you the location, of course. But also, the economics.

The people. The traffic. The terrain.

The weather. The natural features — the forest, the ocean, the rivers. The borders and interconnections among those things.

Quiet technological breakthroughs — the kind of things ordinary people may hardly notice — mean that for the first time in history we can layer all that data onto the same map, onto the same screen. We can see relationships, patterns, and risks we’ve never seen before. That’s exactly what AT&T did in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and what the company is now doing by expanding that dataset across the entire contiguous United States.

Now AT&T can spend its capital budget more wisely and respond to disasters more nimbly. Geography has always been a powerful way of thinking about the world. But geography is being revitalized, even magnified, by a world of inexpensive sensors and internet connections.

It’s a world in which any object can report its location. It’s a world in which data on everything from the weather to credit card spending can be refined down to specific city blocks, or buildings. Combined with today’s high-powered geographic information system (GIS) technology, designed specifically to layer all kinds of data from all kinds of sources together into a single image — we can produce not just a map, but a smart map.

A really smart map. More than ever, geography is becoming a way of seeing important connections and relationships that might otherwise stay hidden. There may be no clearer example of the power and the critical importance of geography than the COVID-19 pandemic.

With iconic map-based dashboards, the pandemic showed that geography — location — is the framework we need to make sense of the complicated world we’ve created. It’s a way of organizing and understanding a problem so we can see solutions and decide where and how to take action. Not just about relatively straight forward problems like where to locate a new coffee shop, or which cell towers to elevate.

In fact, the harder the problem, the more valuable geography and geospatial visualization are. The starting place for many people during the height of COVID were the daily maps that showed where the virus was spreading, and where it was receding. And that’s true both of public officials and medical professionals trying to contain it, and ordinary people trying to protect their families.

Those COVID maps, in layers of detail reaching down to the neighborhood level, were the key tool all the way through, for bolstering testing, changing stay-at-home rules, deciding whether to close schools or open restaurants, and distributing vaccines. We couldn’t have confronted the pandemic without a geographic approach. And the same is true of climate change.

Sustainable commerce. Social inequality. Resilient cities.

Reliable infrastructure. Today, geography isn’t a globe, or an atlas of the roads and towns in a state or country. Geography is the science of integration, and a way of thinking — with the map itself as the foundation.

What’s new is how much information the map can show, and how dynamic that information can be. We all have a sense of this with mapping apps on our smart phones. We open up our phones to see routes and traffic, accidents, and restaurants — all included, all updated in real time.

Geography isn’t just dynamic, it’s a narrative — it shows you a place and tells a story about that place, what’s happening there now, and what will happen next. That dynamic is made possible by the enterprise technology that is modern GIS , and it changes everything — the questions we can ask about a place, or about a problem, the insight we can discover, even the kinds of creative solutions we can bring to bear. As the pandemic and now climate impacts show, geography, geographic thinking, isn’t optional.

We can’t make sense of the world without it. We can’t manage our world without it — whether it’s equitable internet access in the US, energy consumption for a multi-national company, or the current global supply chain issues. Location creates the essential context, no matter the topic.

What we’re discovering – whether it’s the impact of extreme weather or the impact of the pandemic, how to protect rain forest or how to get containers out of the Port of Los Angeles – is we don’t know as much about the world as we think we do. We understand it even less. But a geographic approach brings clarity to all that uncertainty.

We can for the first time in history quickly and easily layer together data from a vast array of sources, that can tell us all kinds of important stories about both the natural world and our human world. This geographic approach is collaborative; it can bring people together regardless of economics or nationalities. And, it can give us what we need: common ground, an entirely new understanding.

Jack Dangermond Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.