Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan today launched CLiMAQ, a climate risk intelligence digital tool, at the Global Sustainability Summit of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here on Thursday. The tool, launched when massive flash floods wreaked havoc in Nepal, provides hyperlocal climate risk intelligence to enterprises and businesses, along with risk projections for the future. In an interview with Business Standard, Anup Jindal, CEO and joint MD, RMSI, and Roli Jindal, co-founder and CEO, RMSI Cropaltyics, discussed the tool’s scale and applicability with Business Standard. RMSI is a technology company delivering advanced solutions in geospatial intelligence, AI, and smart automation to help enterprises address complex challenges such as climate change and disaster management. Edited excerpts
How does the tool help industries?
Anup: As an industry, how do you understand that a predicted increase in temperature or rainfall is relevant for you and for which asset at which location? This is the gap this tool fulfils. It takes the climate models and translates them to a resolution at which the industry is operating.
How does the tool work?
Anup: The models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) inform us about climate risk and future risk projections. The proprietary RMSI models then take input from the IPCC model and resolve it at a much higher resolution. Combined with a business’s or expert’s location data, they understand the likely risk from such disasters. Our models are downscaled to a resolution of 30 metres to 12 km depending on the hazard type, whereas the higher climate models typically operate at 12 to 30 kilometres.
With our proprietary models combining AI and ML with probability distribution, we cover the non-linearity of climate variables and their impact, and also how that is going to be impacted, or how the disaster is likely to be at a particular location.
How is this tool useful for agriculture?
Roli: India has 180 million hectares of farmland. We have all of it mapped. So, we can observe the climate-agriculture linkage at a pan-India and macro scale. If I am a seed company, where should I go? Which villages should I go to? Which village has how much acreage? Where should you send your people? At a very micro level, the crop is healthy on one farm and not on the other. So, we can now pick up those differences with remote sensing research. Plot-by-plot identification also helps identify which plot is stressed.
Anup: These models are equally extensible to the agriculture sector and address the food security risk that climate change imposes.
How have some of the digital insights helped stakeholders?
Roli: We are working with big export councils and associations exporting groundnut and sesame. For the last 3-4 years, we have been working to forecast the production of these crops in every district.
Uttar Pradesh does all its agriculture data reporting using satellite technology, basically digital crop monitoring.
Who can access the tool and what is the pricing?
Anup: It is a software as a service (SaaS) solution that is completely accessible on the internet. There are three versions of the tool. There is a free version which any small enterprise can always view and utilise. Then there is a pro version to which a larger enterprise can subscribe. There is an enterprise version which has custom pricing.
Roli: The enterprise can get the data and further disseminate it to farmers.
