What if you could tell where the next big flood would hit or which region could be ravaged by a drought? Could an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model be used to predict which forest area was most at risk from potentially catastrophic fires?

Advances in supercomputing and AI mean this will soon become a reality. Earth Visualisations Engines, or EVE, is compiling all the data we amass to allow governments and private citizens to mitigate against the effects of climate change.

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The EVE summit in Berlin is bringing together 180 of the world's finest climate scientists from 29 different nations to try and do just that.

‌‌"EVE is an effort to try to engage the most powerful technologies to solve the biggest problems. More specifically, it's a way of bringing large-scale computing and AI to help people understand what climate change really means for them,|" Bjorn Stevens, a climate scientist who is the driving force behind the summit, told CGTN.

Relying on a computer program to predict extreme weather events and the impact of climate change may seem like turning science fiction into science fact, but it also comes with a hefty price tag. To do this properly, it will cost around $2.5 billion a year, but Stevens says that comes with potential savings of trillions of dollars.

‌"If we create enormous amounts of information about possible climate futures and you want a tool to summarize that, like predicting the 15 biggest floods in the next 100 years according to these models in an area, it would help visualize that," explains Stevens.

"So it's really a family of AI and visualization tools that would live on this data layer to help people imagine possible and plausible futures."

'Innovate better and reduce risks'

‌Chinese participation is crucial to the project. Wang Yi, the Vice Chair of the National Expert Panel on Climate Change of China, is also one of the keynote speakers at the EVE summit. He told CGTN that working together to counter climate change is essential.

‌"Cooperation is very important because what we are facing is a global challenge, which means that we must take common actions. I think there is no common future without cooperation so we need this kind of cooperation," said Wang.

"This can motivate us to innovate better and reduce our risks."

‌‌Chinese technology is also at the forefront of mapping and predicting weather events. 

Zhou Tianjun, Deputy Director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says it can provide large-scale systems like EVE with the data it needs on a global scale.

‌"China's Huawei has now developed a Pangu forecasting system, which is used for meteorological and marine meteorological forecasts. And China's Fudan University recently launched a forecasting system called Fuxing, which can forecast the climate for the next 15 years. It has surpassed the world at present," Zhou told CGTN.

‌Compiling this data and knowing which places are at risk is vital amid the growing list of threats we face. 

According to the United Nations, if the world's temperatures increase by about 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, we will see a fivefold global increase in floods, storms, drought and heat waves.

‌In order to take action to reverse the effects of global warming, it can be crucial in identifying which areas are most at risk.

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