Schedule - PGConf NYC 2025

Decoding Climate Science with Open Data Resources: What AI's Energy Needs Mean for Our Planet

Level: Intermediate

Have you heard the expression, Losing the Forest Through the Trees? In a nutshell it means being so focused on details that we miss the bigger picture.

Often in geospatial we are guilty as charged. It is about this tool or that platform vs the important work at hand. Building efficient workflows are an important part of building capacity to hold bigger stories.

A powerful workflow I share when building data stories includes multi-faceted postgreSQL. Specifically QGIS and open source integration bringing a series of interconnected issues—including deforestation, pollution, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss—representing a detachment from ecological systems, exacerbated by not only the energy requirements of exponential AI implementation but global industrial practices that allow environmental harm to be displaced geographically and socially.

Quantitative Storytelling portrays an intricate dance between objective reality—Using the city as an operational unit we will build schema from multiple data sources and learn to tell stories about urban form and morphometrics learning from social demographics and the vulnerabilities encountered with climate risk and change.

Speaker

bonny p mcclain