Elevating Coastal Resilience Technology with Microsoft

TNC, Microsoft and Esri have formed a collaboration around geospatial technology and natural solutions for conservation and climate adaptation planning. This new and exciting partnership is a collaboration between Microsoft and various TNC teams including Washington State, Global Oceans, Water, and TNC’s Technical Information Systems (TIS). The collaboration is in line with Microsoft’s environmental mission to empower people and organizations globally to thrive in a resource-constrained world, and builds on a long history of support and strategic collaboration between the two organizations. As such, Microsoft has committed to support the TNC’s spatial data and tools on the Microsoft Azure cloud for three years.

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The Nature Conservancy (TNC) will migrate specific programs and projects within the Toolkit to Azure and expand it to include: historic, real-time, and climate projection analysis and data processing across social-ecological systems; decision support tool and app design, usability testing, and effective use analytics; and business opportunities that address local and global environmental challenges and identify nature-based adaptation solutions that reduce risk. The development of a stormwater and coastal marine mapping tool for the Puget Sound, as well as identifying water quality and quantity issues globally through a beta Protecting Water Atlas, are local and global examples of where this partnership is working to build geospatial solutions for conservation.

“Technology accelerates everything it is applied to. It therefore holds the promise to accelerate conservation solutions so that they scale to global environmental challenges. This migration to Azure is a great opportunity for TNC in advancing our geospatial decision support tools and web apps that can catalyze conservation and climate adaptation efforts across land and sea.” – Zach Ferdaña, Program Manager for Global Oceans at The Nature Conservancy.