Dev Patel of Harvard describes Bangladesh as “ground zero for the harmful effects
of climate change”. Extreme weather events, particularly floods, are already affecting
the lives of millions of people who live there and are making life more difficult for the
country’s farmers. He tells Tim Phillips how he harnessed machine learning to create
for the first time reliable global data on flooding – and also used his methods to find a
way to give Bangladesh’s beleaguered farmers better data on what crops to grow.