site yesterday · 3 min read · ▲ 99 · climate, earth observation, AI, systems Ryan Orbuch argues for a foundation model trained on the planet itself. An audacious, fundable ask, well made; what it glosses over is that the challenge is social before it is technical, and that there will be many models, not one.
project 2 days ago · 1 min read · ▲ 83 · institutions, governance, systems Michael Zargham's open course in three modules on building and rehabilitating institutions that can sustain healthy relationships with the planet, the biosphere and each other: models within limits, collective action, design principles for governance.
project 2 days ago · 1 min read · ▲ 138 · simulation, decision-making, AI A platform for what its makers call simulation-enabled cooperative human intelligence: people encode causal models of a real problem and use simulation to find near-optimal actions, rather than asking a language model for an answer.
project 3 weeks ago · 1 min read · ▲ 142 · agriculture, climate, water, land One person's map of where the ground still works. A weighted index of climate, water, land quality and hazards, projected for 2070 under SSP2-4.5, with overlays for people, access and land use. Click anywhere and read the score.
project 3 weeks ago · 1 min read · ▲ 52 · food, agriculture, trade, data NASA Harvest's open-access platform puts satellite crop conditions, the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor, trade relationships and food-security assessments side by side, so a blocked strait, a fertiliser shortfall and next year's rice harvest read as one chain instead of three headlines.
reading 3 weeks ago · 1 min read · ▲ 121 · citizen science, reading A University of Queensland release on citizen science: reef surveys, wombat tracking, telescope images and health research done by thousands of volunteers, and what it would take to make that work count.
reading 3 weeks ago · 1 min read · ▲ 22 · ecology, reading A special issue of The Ecologist on Herbert Girardet, cultural ecologist and co-founder of the World Future Council, who spent decades arguing that economies built on escalating resource use cannot coexist with the planet's limits.
story 3 weeks ago · 1 min read · ▲ 28 · water, agriculture, law The Colorado's paper allocations exceed its water, and the shortfall has to land on someone. Set the river's flow, choose the allocation rule, and the model computes who gets what.