Climate change has contributed to extreme weather around the world, fuelling an increased number of phenomena like deadly floods, wildfires and frequent typhoons. As extreme weather unfolds across the globe, people come to Twitter before, during and after these events to talk about what's happening. Powered by social insights and analytics, these real-time conversations could be harnessed to provide instant alerts, relief efforts and assessment of the situation on ground.
Twitter provides companies and individuals with programmatic access to Twitter data through its public application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing them to build apps and tools for consumers to draw insights out of Twitter. Following natural disasters including the Jakarta flooding in Indonesia, Australian bushfires and typhoon "Hagibis" in Japan, Twitter worked with Peta Bencana and Twitter Official Partners like Brandwatch to help local communities understand trends in conversation data. In addition to using the service to share resources, raising funds and rallying around one another, the Tweets create a wealth of social data that could be used to understand the issue of climate change and the crisis more broadly, while enabling policy makers to respond to future climate emergencies.