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Challenging the Client
Trial of Hong Kong Media Mogul Jimmy Lai Comes to a Close
new video loaded: Hong Kong Media Mogul Jimmy Lai’s Trial Wraps Up
By Jiawei Wang•
The national security trial of Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media tycoon, closed on Thursday. The critic of the Chinese Community Party has become a symbol of how free speech has been squashed in the city.
Recent episodes in International
International video coverage from The New York Times.
International video coverage from The New York Times.
Consumer sentiment in Italy deteriorates beyond expectations, while business morale remains stable
Italy consumer sentiment worsens more than expected, business morale stable
Russian Attack on Ukrainian Capital Results in Multiple Fatalities and Dozens Injured | Latest Updates on Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Published On 28 Aug 2025
Russia has launched a drone and missile attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, including a rare hit on the city centre, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens of others, authorities said.
Powerful explosions illuminated the predawn sky on Thursday, leaving columns of smoke as Russian projectiles damaged buildings across multiple districts in the Ukrainian capital.
The assault marked the first major combined attack on Kyiv in weeks, occurring as United States-led peace initiatives struggle to gain momentum in the three-year conflict.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at least eight people were killed in the assault.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said two children were among those killed, citing preliminary information.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko characterised it as a “massive attack” causing widespread damage. He said at least 38 people were wounded, including 30 who were admitted to hospital.
Tymur Tkachenko, head of the city’s military administration, reported that Moscow launched ballistic and cruise missiles along with Iranian-designed Shahed drones from multiple directions to “systematically” target residential buildings.
Red tracer rounds streaked through the night sky as defenders attempted to intercept drones above the city centre, with at least one missile appearing to be shot down. Approximately 100 residents sought shelter in a subway station, some in sleeping bags or holding pets.
A five-storey building collapsed in the Darnytskyi district, while a shopping mall in the city centre was struck, Klitschko stated.
Ukrainian officials also reported a Russian strike in the Zaporizhia region on Thursday.
Russian authorities claimed they destroyed more than 100 Ukrainian drones overnight, while an attack reportedly caused a fire at an oil refinery in the Krasnodar region without casualties.
Russian forces have been making slow but steady territorial gains in recent months as diplomatic efforts have intensified. Trump recently held high-profile meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and later with Zelenskyy, as well as European allies.
However, diplomatic progress remains limited. Ukraine seeks Western security guarantees against future Russian attacks before finalising any peace agreement. Moscow has dismissed Kyiv’s demands as unrealistic, particularly opposing Western peacekeeping forces in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy announced on Wednesday that Ukrainian officials would meet their US counterparts in New York on Friday. The Ukrainian leader noted “very arrogant and negative signals from Moscow regarding the negotiations”, calling for additional “pressure” to “force Russia to take real steps”.
Willem Sems of HSBC discusses the importance of diversifying investments into China from the US
When President Trump returned to the White House his intention was clear: Make America Great Again. But the United States’s economic partners, and some of its rivals, are also benefitting from having the unorthodox showman back in the Oval Office.
Investors are watching the U.S. stock market with both enthusiasm and trepidation: The S&P 500 is up 15% over the past year, Treasuries have remained relatively steady, and the Fed’s monetary policy is expected to begin a downwards trajectory.
But overlaying the strong fundamentals are questions: Is the soaring growth of the Magnificent 7 stocks overvalued on the unfulfilled promises of AI? Will Trump’s unusual foreign policy materially damage the domestic economy? And where might the true winners of the artificial intelligence race emerge from?
Increasingly, investors are answering those questions by diversifting into a key region says Willem Sels, the global chief investment officer for HSBC’s global private bank. That region is China.
America continues to prove to its economic resilience and earnings deliverables, Sels told Fortune in an exclusive interview, but geopolitical uncertainty is pushing investors towards balancing risk with other regions.
Traditionally, the question of political influence over portfolios has centered on emerging markets, said Sels, but over the past few years that has moved into developed markets as well. As such, diversification has become more of a focus—particularly for business owners looking to spread risk between the economy they operate in and the assets used to protect their wealth.
“When a client comes in the door … the first discussion is please build a global portfolio. Maybe try to have as little as possible in your home country if you already have your business here, because that’s diversification,” Sels said. “Clearly the debate over the last few months was about, will there be diversification away from the U.S.? And there are a number of elements to that.”
Part of the question is how dominant U.S. Big Tech has become in equity markets, with the Magnificent 7 stocks (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla) providing most of the growth. As such, if these stocks hiccup it can have major ramifications for portfolios.
“Clearly you potentially need to do something around that … to diversify,” Sels said, “We highlight things like make sure that you don’t only have the growth stocks but have some value stocks, do some sector diversification, do some geographical diversification and so on.
“The other thing that triggered that diversification discussion obviously was the rapid policy changes in the U.S., and the growth of the debt pile, which led people to ask the question, is there a de-dollarization story and what does that mean in terms of my portfolio and other people’s portfolio? What we’ve seen in the data is that there have been two months or so where there were some outflows out of bonds and equity markets, but that has not lasted—to a large extent because policy has become a little bit clearer.”
Safe haven out of Europe and into China
“People are adding a little bit to other regions, adding a little bit to other sectors to be less concentrated in the U.S. market, but they are not fleeing away from it,” Sels continued. “There was enthusiasm for European stocks, but it was very short-lived. The Asian investors over the last 15 [to] 20 years that I’ve been going there find it very hard to get excited about Europe.”
Part of the problem is that these investors don’t see as many new or emerging companies which could materially change the European economy, and there’s also the issue of brand recognition beyond companies like LVMH and BMW, Sels said.
“This is the first time that we’re again seeing flows from Europe into China,” Sels added. “That is to a large extent because of the AI trade that people want to play, and then secondly this concept of anti-involution … with the supply side reforms which would address the issue of overcapacity, therefore the deflation issue and therefore the earnings growth, because what you have in China is a lot of very competitive companies … therefore they have no pressing power and therefore earnings growth has been reasonably weak.”
China has signaled a shift in priorities to address involution, with the country’s Central Finance and Economic Affairs Commission telling President Xi Jinping in a meeting last month that Beijing must “focus on key and difficult issues, regulate enterprises’ disorderly and low-price competition” and “guide enterprises to improve product quality and promote the orderly exit of outdated production capacity.”
Beijing is no stranger to the issue. In 2015 the government launched similar action to address overcapacity, particularly in key regions like steel and coal, in order to boost corporate profitability.
Flash forward to 2025 and “they’re now addressing that,” Sels said, “Therefore we think that earnings expectations will go up … one of the main obstacles for our clients had been the belief that [Chinese companies are] over-competing and therefore your earnings are not there, the economic growth is potentially there, but your earnings are not there.”
“That’s now changing, so we’re seeing flows back and obviously also encouraged by ‘How can I diversify my big U.S. trunk of assets?’”
AI discount
With discussions about diversification out of U.S. remaining active, China seems to have emerged as the region to balance that risk, Sels said. And Beijing’s typically lower share prices also offer the category of the moment, AI, at a bargain.
In a note published last week, HSBC noted that within the AI ecosystem, infrastructure stocks are outperforming enablers and adopters—at 22.2% versus 11.3% and 13.5% since July. Indeed, this week Chinese chipmaker Cambricon Technologies briefly became the country’s most expensive stock, surging 10% on Wednesday to 1,465 yuan ($204.62). At the time of writing, the share price has dropped back but is up 112% for the year to date.
And while Cambricon exemplifies the more expensive end of the scale, Sels highlights that other equivalents to U.S. stocks can be found at a “30 to 40% discount.”
“We’re basically saying, listen, don’t just look at the chips makers but also look at the guys that build out the infrastructure around it. The guys that build out the energy, the electricity supply around it, the robotics and automation where it is not just a matter of we move the data a little bit—this is real, big innovation. And so by diversifying throughout the AI ecosystem, I think you address a little bit the question about valuations.”
China’s stock market is soaring: The SSE Composite Index is up 33.4% over the past year while the S&P 500 is up 14.9%. While the growth in China is marked, HSBC’s research points out U.S. AI-related capex (driven by the “Big 4” of Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta along with
Stargate and other private companies) are outspending China’s “Big 4” (Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and Baidu, as well as telecom services companies) by eight to 10 times.
Moreover, HSBC’s research adds: “U.S. firms achieve higher returns on AI capex, with cloud platforms generating significantly more revenue than their Chinese counterparts – close to USD $400bn in the U.S. vs. USD $60bn in China in 2024, according to Statista.”
So while clients may be balancing against over-reliance on American companies, Sels said, the upside fundamentals of the U.S. remain strong—enough so to take a recession off the table. Indeed, while blips in tech stocks recently led to questions over an AI bubble, the HSBC boss remained bullish: “We certainly think that that AI liftoff is structural in nature.”
Eight people, including children, killed in overnight attack on Kyiv
Chris Graham & Ottilie Mitchell
BBC News
ReutersEight people have been killed in Kyiv after a heavy Russian bombardment overnight, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram that the dead included two children, while Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said at least 38 people had been injured in the “massive” drone and missile attack.
In a statement on X, Zelensky said the Kremlin had chosen “ballistics instead of the negotiating table”, and reiterated the need for “new, tough sanctions” on Russia.
The wave of missiles comes after more than 100,000 Ukrainian homes were left without power by Russian drone attacks on energy infrastructure on Wednesday.
In a post on Telegram, Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said one of the children who was killed was a 14-year-old girl. At least five children had been injured in the latest drone strikes.
He noted more than 20 districts had been targeted, with many buildings including a kindergarten catching on fire.
Three and a half years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, fighting on the ground shows no sign of abating.
The latest international effort to achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine was launched by US President Donald Trump earlier this month. He met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska and Zelensky with European leaders in Washington.
Trump has been pushing for a Putin-Zelensky summit. Ukraine’s president has backed the move, but he has sought security guarantees from Western allies to prevent any future Russian attack in the event of a peace deal.
On Tuesday, Zelensky met the head of Britain’s armed forces, Adm Sir Tony Radakin, in Kyiv, where they discussed efforts to end the war.
US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff has said he would meet Ukrainian representatives in New York this week, telling Fox News “we talk to the Russians every day”.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has warned that handing over Ukrainian territory to Russia as part of a peace deal was a “trap”.
Netflix’s most-watched movie of all time is now ‘KPop Demon Hunters’
Netflix‘s animated film KPop Demon Hunters has officially become the streaming platform’s most popular movie ever, accumulating 236 million views since its June 20 release and adding another 25.4 million views in the week ending August 24.
Netflix’s previous record holder, Red Notice, accumulated 230 million views during its first 91 days on the platform after being released in 2021. KPop Demon Hunters has 24 days remaining before surpassing the same 91-day premiere window.
The film’s remarkable performance shows no signs of slowing, with Deadline reporting that KPop Demon Hunters has exhibited nearly 0% audience decline for three consecutive weeks after two straight intervals of 26 million views each.
The Sony Pictures Animation production is building on the unprecedented success of its music: on Monday (August 25), it was confirmed that KPop Demon Hunters had become the first ever soundtrack to claim four simultaneous Top 10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100.
The launch of KPop Demon Hunters The Sing-Along Event — which hit theaters and Netflix in the past week — drove additional viewing. (Netflix’s latest stats combine viewership numbers for both the original and sing-along versions.)
The theatrical sing-along event delivered an estimated $19 million at the North American box office over the weekend. It achieved more than 1,000 sold-out screenings across the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand before becoming available for streaming on Netflix.
Republic Records released the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, which features contributions from major K-pop industry figures including THEBLACKLABEL co-founder TEDDY, who has worked with BLACKPINK and Taeyang.
Grammy-nominated producers who have collaborated with BTS, TWICE, and Tomorrow X Together also contributed to the project.
The soundtrack includes an original song, Takedown, performed by three members of TWICE – Jeongyeon, Jihyo, and Chaeyoung.
Another track, Golden recently reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 after initially hitting No. 2, making it the first Hot 100 leader by a female K-pop group.
The fictional groups created for the film – HUNTR/X and Saja Boys – have generated streaming numbers comparable to established K-pop acts.
HUNTR/X’s Golden has topped both the Billboard Global 200 and Global Excl. U.S. charts for multiple weeks, while Your Idol by Saja Boys peaked at No. 4 on the Hot 100.
The film’s 12-track soundtrack features performances by EJAE, AUDREY NUNA, REI AMI, Andrew Choi, Danny Chung, Kevin Woo, samUIL Lee, Neckwav, and Lea Salonga.
Production credits include TEDDY, 24, IDO, DOMINSUK, Jenna Andrews, Stephen Kirk, Lindgren, and executive music producer Ian Eisendrath.
The success demonstrates the commercial viability of fictional music groups when supported by authentic K-pop production talent.
Directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans assembled a team capable of composing songs that industry observers say rival current K-pop hits.Music Business Worldwide
Paris Tourism Report Reveals 420,000 More Tourists During Olympics Compared to Same Period in 2023
By Terin Frodyma on SwimSwam
Although there was a noticeable increase in tourism during the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, the vast majority of visitors were French, according to a recent report from the French tourism agency Paris je t’Amime. Roughly 11.2 million people took part in Olympic-related activities throughout the Greater Paris area, with 85% of visitors being from the host country of France.
The breakdown shows just how local the Games were:
- 5.2 million (46%) were residents of the Île-de-France region of France
- 3 million (27%) were only day visitors who chose not to stay overnight
- 3 million (27%) stayed overnight
Among overnight visitors, 1.4 million were French tourists, a jump of 24% compared to 2023, while 1.6 million were non-French tourists, up 10% from the same time period in 2023. In total, there were about 420,000 more tourists during the Games period than the year before.
Looking at the breakdown of the foreign tourism, the top international representation for tourists included:
- 230,000 from the U.S.
- 130,000 from Germany
- 115,00 from Great Britain
- 107,000 from Brazil
- 82,000 from China
Hotels benefited most from the surge. Occupancy reached upwards of 84%, up more than ten percentage points from 2023, while room prices climbed 18%.
Landmark French attractions actually saw a lower turnout, as tourists were preoccupied by the Olympic Games:
- Louvre attendance dropped 22%.
- Musée d’Orsay fell 29%.
- Château de Versailles was down 25%.
On a global level, regional tourism was down 4.7% from July 1 to August 11 compared to the same period last summer, although activity picked up after the Paralympic Games, which sold more than 2.5 million tickets.
Fan zones, such as the Terrasse des Jeux and the Parc George-Valbon, set up across Paris were popular, welcoming 7.5 million people. The Olympic Torch Relay was another big draw, passing in front of 8 million people in over 450 French cities and towns.
The Paralympic Games welcomed 3.4 million visitors, 1.9 million of whom were tourists. Although the number of French tourists (950,000) was down slightly from 2023, the number of international visitors remained unchanged (970,000). The Paralympic torch relay was viewed by nearly 600,000 people in over 50 communities.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: Paris Tourism Report Shows 420,000 Tourist Increase During Olympics from Same Period in 2023
Rare earth shortages are slowing down India’s growing EV sector due to trade war
In July, India’s best-selling electric scooter, Bajaj Auto’s Chetak, hit a big speed bump. A shortage of rare-earth metals had hit production plans, and the company was forced to almost halve its output.
Bajaj manufactured just 10,824 units of the Chetak in July, as compared with 20,384 units during the same period last year, due to rare earth shortages.
“The rare-earth magnet supply situation has been a constraint that created the risk of a sharper production dip in July,” Rakesh Sharma, executive director of Bajaj Auto, told Al Jazeera.
The company has since quickly redesigned certain motors to use light rare-earth magnets and has been reworking supply chains so it can cater to its needs, Sharma said.
“These changes helped us recover close to half of our planned July output for electric two-wheelers. We expect to reach around 60 percent [of output] during August and September.”
The shortage that Bajaj is facing is industry-wide after China introduced restrictions on its rare earth exports on April 4, two days after United States President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on April 2. No shipment has come to India since then, putting automobile and other industries reliant on these metals in jeopardy.
Vigneshwar Chittur Selvakumar, president of the Federation of Automobile Dealers Association (FADA) that counts about 15,000 automobile retailers across the country as its members, says he is “deeply concerned” about how the shortages of these metals “might have a drastic impact on the automobile sector”.
“We control around 80 percent sales of the vehicles, and any dip in production will affect our business badly,” Vigneshwar said.
Rare-earth metals refer to a combination of 17 metallic elements, including dysprosium, terbium, europium, samarium, and gadolinium, that are found in abundance in China, which has the world’s largest reserves of rare-earth elements, estimated at 44 million tonnes, and dominates 90 percent of rare-earth elements processing capacity.
Apart from EVs, the metals are also used in smartphones, computer screens, and other electronic devices. They are also essential for defence equipment like radar and guidance systems, as well as medical machines such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging systems.
“The rare-earth elements help in making strong magnets that are used widely in electric vehicles … to maintain a stable magnetic field,” Aman Bir Singh, an EV consultant, told Al Jazeera. “Internal combustion engine (ICE) or hybrid vehicles that run on petrol, diesel and wind turbines also use them, but in a very small quantity, and the current shortage doesn’t impact them as much.”
The shortage comes just as India’s EV sector was taking off with sales crossing 2 million for the first time in 2024. This was up 24 percent from 1.6 million vehicle sales in 2023. Two-wheelers lead that with sales of 1.2 million units last year.
Sales of electric cars, too, are on the rise, and more than 100,000 electric cars were sold in the financial year ending March 31, 2025. Tesla, too, has joined in and launched its Model Y in the country in July. As a result, the electric car penetration has more than doubled from 1 percent to 2.6 percent during this period, and is expected to cross 7 percent by 2028, according to a July report by CareEdge Analytics & Advisory.
Several EV companies, however, have refrained from speaking on the rare earth crisis.
“The industry is still in a fledgling state and companies fear that they might lose customers and also their share value if they concede to rare earth shortage as the potential buyers might be too apprehensive to purchase the vehicles,” said Nilanjan Banik, an economics professor at Mahindra University.
The shortage has also affected the television industry, where rare-earth magnets are critical in television manufacturing, particularly for speakers, due to their superior performance and compact size.
“As the country remains heavily reliant on imports for these components, this presents a clear challenge,” said Arjun Bajaj, director of Videotex – television manufacturers for various reputed brands. “We currently have adequate stocks for the current season, but our focus is also to find an alternative solution, and the industry is actively exploring alternatives like ferrite magnets, though matching the performance of rare-earth magnets will require continued research and technological upgrades,” he added.
Relief for India
On August 19, China announced it would ease export restrictions on fertilisers, rare earths, and tunnel-boring machines to India after talks with Indian foreign minister S Jaishankar in Beijing.
Experts, however, called this a “tactical gesture”.
India’s trade deficit with China hit a record $100bn in the last financial year. Beijing has also openly backed India’s archenemy Pakistan in a recent clash between New Delhi and Islamabad in May, a reminder that India’s dependence on China can be risky for it.
“India’s dependence on China gives [the latter] significant leverage during crises,” pointed out Ajay Srivastava, the founder of Global Research Trade Initiative (GTRI), a trade research group.
“China now supplies over 70 percent of India’s needs in several critical areas. Everyday products like laptops (80.5 percent) and flat panel displays (86 percent) are also dominated by Chinese imports. At the same time, India’s share in bilateral trade has collapsed to just 11.2 percent from 42.3 percent two decades ago, exposing the fragility of supply chains. The easing of rare earth supply is just a tactical gesture and nothing beyond,” Srivastava said.
India holds the fifth-largest rare-earth elements with 8.52 million tonnes, but contributes less than 1 percent of the global rare-earth mining as it faces stiff challenges with limited infrastructure, technological issues and regulatory hurdles and environmental concerns.
Vishwas Dass, a Delhi-based policy expert, told Al Jazeera that the current disruption must be used to accelerate domestic exploration and offer incentives for refining capabilities, and forging mineral alliances with trusted nations.
The Geological Survey of India (GSI) has already started exploration in the states of Assam and West Bengal.
“The exploration is part of India’s long-term strategic vision to achieve self-reliance in key sectors and aligns with the government’s policy of securing domestic mineral supplies for further technological and industrial needs,” Asit Saha, director general of GSI, told Al Jazeera.
Mahindra University’s Banik, however, says that processing of rare-earth metals will be a tricky issue. “It might take over a decade to completely set up the processing units of rare metals, but the technology of using rare earth in vehicles might become outdated by then.”
Combating Wildfires: The Role of Drones and Data When Dealing with Fire Outbreaks
Few challenges test the limits of technology as severely as natural disasters. The day when humanity is fully prepared for them never seems to arrive. Even the most obvious assumptions can prove unreliable. Albrecht Beck, founder and CEO of Prepared International, UN adviser on natural disaster recovery and a regular speaker at the Disasters Expo, recalls that many lives were spared during Hawaii’s devastating 2023 wildfires precisely because the warning systems were not activated.
“In the case of the fires in Hawaii, there was no warning because the only disaster people there recognise as the primary threat has always been the tsunami,” Beck explains. “So, had an alert been issued, people would have fled towards the mountains—straight into the path of the fire.”
Collaboration is essential when facing a natural force capable of wreaking record levels of destruction. In California alone, damages this year have been estimated at an unprecedented $165 billion. According to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, over 60,000 fires ignite across the EU each year, consuming an average of 500,000 hectares, claiming lives and generating losses of around €2 billion.
On 17 June, G7 leaders signed the Kananaskis Forest Fire Charter, marking a landmark commitment. The deployment of fire management technologies features prominently in this declaration. In parallel, initiatives such as the European Patent Office’s (EPO) Firefighting Technologies platform have been launched to gather the most promising ideas and make them available to companies and public authorities.
Prevention is key
It is striking that a reconstruction specialist such as Albrecht Beck places so much emphasis on the pre-disaster phase: “Afterwards, it is always too late. We must succeed during preparation, not once disaster has already struck on such a dramatic scale,” he insists.
When it comes to forest fires, prevention remains the major unresolved challenge in every country. Public spending on firefighting still outweighs prevention budgets by as much as six to one. The OECD has warned of the common practice of “fire loans”, in which funds earmarked for prevention are diverted to finance emergency response and recovery.
Innovation in wildfire management must be pursued from multiple disciplines. The Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia, Spain, has launched 11 Living Labs as part of the FIRE-RES project. These open-air test sites allow firefighters, researchers, farmers and local communities to trial new approaches, including drone-based early detection systems, controlled burns and fire-resistant construction materials.
Meanwhile, Canada’s FPInnovations’ Wildfire Operations Research programme has employed industrial-grade cinema smoke machines to train fire-alert technologies in recognising wildfire signatures. The datasets generated are now available to technology developers keen to refine their artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
Data as a fireline
A digital ecosystem of data platforms will be indispensable in understanding and combating wildfires in the years ahead. The EU has launched the EFFIS programme, while the United States’ ACERO project is harnessing NASA’s expertise to develop an air traffic management system enabling drones to fight fires even in low light and poor visibility. ACERO has also acquired a portable airspace management system (PAMS), compact enough to fit in a briefcase, to support drone operators in the field.
Reliable real-time data is crucial. EURO1k is the first numerical weather model covering Europe and parts of North Africa with a one-kilometre resolution. Its developers claim it can accurately simulate small-scale weather events, including thunderstorms, hail and gales.
Satellite systems can now detect a fire in as little as one minute, while the ALERT network, run by the universities of Reno, Nevada and Oregon, has confirmed detections in under three minutes using cameras and sensors. Spain’s Technosylva combines geospatial and government data with GPS feeds from firefighters to generate real-time simulations guiding operational decisions. Its software, used by power companies, manages over 20,000 incidents worldwide each year.
Bringing detection and suppression technologies together is proving decisive. FireMap, developed by WIFIRE Lab—a spin-off of the San Diego Supercomputer Centre—uses AI to produce predictive maps of wildfire trajectories within minutes. Meanwhile, Stanford University researchers have developed a fire-retardant gel that acts as a protective barrier for forested areas..
Unmanned aviation takes on wildfires
Alongside the growth of data platforms, one of the most dynamic areas of innovation lies in unmanned aviation. China has begun mass production of the AG600 Kunlong, the world’s largest amphibious aircraft, developed by the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). With a range of 4,500 kilometres, it can carry 12 tonnes of water for firefighting missions.
Drones may well prove the most effective tool for early fire mitigation. The Windracers Ultra fixed-wing drone can deliver over 100 kilograms of fire retardant and is fitted with artificial intelligence designed by the University of Sheffield. Using thermal and optical imaging, it can autonomously detect and evaluate wildfires.
The Ignis system, a funnel-shaped attachment fixed to the underside of a drone, can release 450 small incendiary capsules, known as “dragon eggs”, in about four minutes. Each contains two chemicals that ignite upon impact, creating controlled burns to deprive a larger fire of fuel.
Elsewhere, a Canadian company is developing quadcopter drones for wildfire suppression. Equipped with sensors and AI-driven swarm algorithms originally designed for defence, each drone is capable of lifting 400 kilograms—about a third of a conventional helicopter’s load—and can operate at night.
“Today’s technology can handle vastly greater volumes of data,” concludes Albrecht Beck. “Drone swarms can now provide continuous, real-time coverage, and artificial intelligence makes sense of it all. Just four or five years ago, it was overwhelming—we could not process it quickly enough during an emergency. Now, AI does that work for us.”
Sources: