After its hottest summer ever, Britain is teaching AI to spot wildfires before they spread

Wildfires used to be someone else's problem in Britain — then came the hottest summer on record, with long dry spells fuelling blazes across the country. Now the government is fighting back early: Prime Minister Andy Burnham will announce a new AI unit inside the National Situation Centre — the room where the country coordinates its emergency response — built to spot wildfires faster using satellite monitoring and early warnings, with firms like Google and Airbus sharing what their technology can do. Fire crews are getting backup too: £45 million (about $60 million) for wildfire-specific protective gear, after it emerged that more than half of fire services had none, plus military planes and helicopters made available for fires in remote terrain, and funding for farmers to make the landscape itself more fire-resilient.

SDG 13 · Climate action — Mechanism: policy reform