Obviously we are all extremely disappointed in today’s announcement that the US will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

Development Seed is driven by a deep belief in our responsibility to protect this Planet. We nearly always say yes to any project, big or small, that we believe can make a meaningful impact on addressing Climate Change. We’ve been able to do this while building a successful business that creates jobs in the United States. The proceeds of our business fund research and development of new open source software for deriving insight from earth data. These free and open tools power the work of climate scientists, government agencies, and industry.

Climate Change will be a defining condition of this century. We will continue to do whatever we can to understand our planet, and how human activities are changing our climate. With our partners and clients, we will look for solutions that improve peoples’ lives and our Blue Marble. Our experience shows that this is possible. Our friends at Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Climatescope show that green energy can be good for the planet and good for business. The inspiring team at Carnegie Endowments Energy and Climate Program show that we can reduce greenhouse gas without changing oil consumption simply by being smarter about what oil is used and for what purpose.

Specifically we will:

• continue to support accessible, open earth data such as supporting Earth data products on AWS such as MODIS and Landsat and working with NASA to move Earth Data streams closer to massive public computing capacity.
• build and maintain climate.developmentseed.org, an open API of critical climate datasets. (Or if someone else already built this, let us know and we will help.)
• create a Climate Science Fellowship that offers a competitive salary for a recent machine learning graduate to build open models for understanding climate data.

Our team is made up of people from around this planet, from Pittsburgh to Porto. We know we have a job to do.