As the Conference of the Parties’ U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21)comes to a close and the draft text for a global agreement on climate change is sent to world capitals for discussion, the northeastern U.S. is starting to mentally prepare itself for another winter. This tech executive in particular marked the occasion by finally storing away his flip-flops for the year and reinvestigating the concept of closed-toe shoes. Last winter left Boston, in particular, under soft mountains of snow that shut down the city — four blizzards in three weeks — and lent a certain credence to visions of a future post–environmental apocalypse similar to that of South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s film Snowpiercer. In the film, the world is covered in ice, and survivors shuttle around in an enormous freight train, their former homes destroyed. In Boston, of course, most of the trains, from Amtrak to the T, the metro area’s public transit system, stopped running.
How will businesses develop in a world whose weather has become increasingly unpredictable — and will continue to alter communal life and commercial undertakings for decades, even centuries, to come? The Washington Post listed a number of technologies that might help the western and southwestern U.S. manage an imminent megadrought, including desalination plants and agricultural drones for monitoring and fertilizer distribution. Across the West Coast, East Coast and their receding coastlines, where do investors look if they want to help grow companies providing answers to the most pressing questions of our age?
The Post’s first suggestion was the Internet of Things — and rightfully so. As in California, so too in Massachusetts and New York: Smarter infrastructure management, whether it is of water for irrigation or transportation systems, will help cities cope with meteorological events. Companies like the start-ups Milwaukee-based WelIntel and Toronto-based WatrHub are both cited by the Post: The former monitors groundwater levels and pump activity for homeowners, farmers and cities, whereas the latter is a water-focused data-mining and analytics company. Each involves the use of IoT-wired sensors intended to decrease waste and better allocate resources, as well as make recommendations for the timely replacement of parts to increase efficiency. Baswood Corp., a privately held firm headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, is building advanced technologies that will allow companies and cities to treat wastewater with half as much energy as is required by traditional methods.
Responses last winter to the snow pileup in the Northeast were lower-tech: Buffalo, New York, for instance, created a GPS to handle requests for snowplowing. Pittsburgh’s Snow Plow Tracker system activates when levels of snow reach six inches, so the city can keep abreast of plow progress in real time and allocate plows more efficiently. Citizens can also check to see if their paths to work are clear, an enormous boon. Boston, too, outfitted its plows with GPS, although, as pointed out in a New York Times op-ed written by a journalism fellow at Brandeis University, so unpredictable now is climate change that the city probably merited national disaster relief. Without intending to slight municipal efforts, it seems likely that good solutions might have to come from the private, not the public, sector: Uber for snowplows, perhaps, involving not just tracking but dispatch systems — are likely to appear, and might draw the attention of early-phase investors. Calling you out here, Travis.
In the past Snowmageddon, the city of Boston announced a partnership with the Google-owned start-up Waze to help residents and visitors in navigating its famously tangled streets (the local explanation, probably apocryphal, is that the city’s main arteries were laid down on top of old cow paths). The app synthesizes crowd-sourced traffic data into directions, circumventing an embarrassing physical fact the city simply cannot change or handle on its own. More partnerships of this kind should pop over the next years; we may also see the wisdom of the crowd recruited to manage our responses to climate. NOAA’s mPING collects weather data from on-the-ground users all over the country; in the private sector, there’s WeatherSignal, a project run by the London-based wireless-coverage-mapping company OpenSignal. WeatherSignal collects micro meteorological knowledge so that, for instance, travelers going from the top to the bottom of Manhattan know whether it’s raining at their destination — which may become important if the weather keeps getting weirder.
On a perhaps bleaker note, what of the fact that many Boston streets went unplowed last winter? There was simply too much snow — and too little money in the city budget — to plow all of it. Restricted mobility meant some residents were unable to make it to the grocery store, much less to work. Solutions like the eventual use of delivery drones might ease life in the age of meteorologically restricted mobility. Cincinnati-based Workhouse Group, for instance, has successfully debuted a truck-launched delivery drone that might take over the skies well before Amazon’s Prime Air, at least according to Popular Science. We may also see more and more technologies that allow for all sorts of business tasks to be performed remotely, from manufacturing to distance learning. Educational technology companies that can help school districts and universities provide cyberlessons, instead of canceling instruction, should experience a lift. Cost has already stymied “cyber day programs” in some cities, indicating a major opportunity as yet unclaimed by technology entrepreneurs.
These predictions are somewhat general, of course — and the companies that prove them correct might not even exist yet — but they ought to both alert investors to sectors of potential interest and remind us that there are ways of forestalling catastrophe, of shaping and guiding the development of particular technologies and industries and attending to shifting markets such that climate change does not equal financial or economic disaster. We have a difficult century ahead of us, but it seems there may still be opportunities to thrive. Nobody should board a Snowpiercer — at least not yet.
