Empowering Cleaner Air and Community Resilience Through Data

The Social Impact Partner Spotlight series highlights various nonprofit organization partners that are leveraging technology to help transform the lives of individuals and communities. This blog features Splunk’s partnership with OpenAQ, Radiant Earth, and WattTime, demonstrating their efforts to enhance data access and digital tools that support informed decision-making for a healthier planet.

Data, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital tools can help uncover solutions to complex environmental challenges that can be implemented at scale for maximum impact. However, while much of the data exists, the datasets are enormous. That means that too often, nonprofits, governments, and other organizations aren’t able to access the data in a searchable and usable way.

In October 2024, Splunk was pleased to provide strategic grants to three nonprofits that are working to advance solutions for a sustainable planet: OpenAQ, Radiant Earth, and WattTime. While each has a distinctive history and approach, they share a commitment to increasing data access and providing digital tools to support better decision-making that will have a positive and lasting impact on our world.

Empowering a global community to improve air quality

OpenAQ is an environmental tech nonprofit focused on increasing access to air quality data to help communities take action to pursue clean air initiatives. Its story started ten years ago when founder Christa Hasenkopf was a State Department scientist working to compile data on air quality at embassies. She quickly learned that data was either nonexistent or not openly available, and when existent, it was challenging to access and not standardized. Christa and her spouse, Joe Flasher, who worked at an engineering company that applies energy and environmental data to global challenges, knew open data was crucial in educating people on the severity of air pollution. They envisioned a universally accessible, open-source database of air quality data, and when they couldn’t find one, they set out to build one.

Today, Open AQ’s open-source, open-access data platform is the largest such platform in the world. It aggregates real-time air quality measurements from thousands of monitoring stations worldwide, harmonizing the data for consistency, focusing on core air pollutants like PM2.5, PM10, NO₂, SO₂, CO and ozone. That data empowers communities to analyze and forecast air quality, raise awareness among the public, and develop solutions to combat air pollution. Users include scientists, journalists, government agencies, entrepreneurs and NGOs, united by a common goal: supporting a world where everyone breathes healthy air.

Making environmental data readily available to more people

Founded in 2016, Radiant Earth enables data-driven decision making to address challenges related to sustainability and conservation. By providing a platform and resources for accessing and utilizing satellite imagery and geospatial data, Radiant Earth is making environmental data more accessible to help governments, research institutions, and civil society organizations address complex global challenges.

One example of this is their work organizing the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum, which brings geospatial data users together from across government, industry, and academia to develop open and more accessible methods for working with Earth science data over the Internet – including satellite imagery, weather data, and climate models – which can provide vital insights for applications like crop mapping, forest monitoring, and urban planning. This approach is designed specifically to empower researchers in developing countries to access and analyze data that was previously only accessible to research institutions with powerful compute infrastructure.

Creating tools that boost energy efficiency and reduce emissions

What if three simple fixes could save 9+ gigatons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions annually: changing when we use energy, where we build new clean energy sources and which suppliers we procure from? WattTime is developing innovative data-driven solutions that allow individuals, companies, and governments to make informed energy choices, enhancing energy efficiency and reducing emissions.

WattTime uses real-time electricity grid data to determine the emissions impact of using electricity at any given moment. Founded by UC Berkeley researchers, its tools pinpoint the emissions from generators operating to meet electricity demand, combining this information with forecasting techniques to predict when energy has the lowest GHG emissions. It transforms that data into actionable signals that can automatically adjust the timing of energy use, shared with partners through an API.

Those signals can be used to optimize smart devices like electric vehicles, thermostats and water heaters to use electricity at lower-emission times, with slight timing shifts adding up to significant reductions in emissions. Similarly, it can help assess where building new clean energy sources could have the greatest impact on reducing power grid emissions. That helps increase the adoption of clean energy sources, benefiting both people and our planet.

To learn more about how organizations are harnessing the power of technology to drive climate solutions, visit Cisco’s Climate Grants and Investments page.

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