AI: The Best New Tool for Disaster Management
When wildfires raged across Los Angeles in January 2025, Good360 was ready to help. The nonprofit takes surplus products from corporate partners and distributes them to people who urgently need them. And Angelenos who had just lost their homes needed plenty of supplies, as did the first responders battling the blazes.
In the past, Good360’s two-person disaster relief team would have sorted through spreadsheets to get the right products to the right people. But with the LA fires, they had extra help, thanks to an artificial intelligence (AI) agent by Agentforce, the Salesforce platform for building and deploying agents.
As the wildfires spread, the agent created summaries of donated products and combed through Good360’s network of nonprofits to see who needed them (Good360 is essentially a matchmaker for nonprofits and corporations). Matches that once took the disaster relief team 30 minutes now took 10. The agent also anticipated needs the team hadn’t. For example, it quickly located the tents the team was seeking and found a nonprofit that needed them. But it also suggested workboots, which Good360 staffers hadn’t thought of.
The agent’s work was a testament to how AI can help with disaster relief. “Traditional disaster relief efforts have built an incredible foundation. But now, AI offers a way to accelerate our response by supercharging human expertise — it represents a step change in how we can save lives and support communities in real-time,” said Sunya Norman, senior vice president of impact at Salesforce.
Even better, the technology is becoming a powerful tool for preventing disasters in the first place.
AI is the right tool at the right moment
Even though AI presents potential environmental challenges, it can also significantly scale solutions for the climate and planet. It can act as a force for good. As natural disasters become more frequent and severe, humans are searching for ways to prevent them or hasten relief efforts. Increasingly, AI is the answer.
The stakes are high. Global insured losses from natural catastrophes have grown 5% to 7% annually and were on track to reach $145 billion in 2025. These are simply financial costs; they don’t factor in lives lost or people displaced from homes.
But AI can predict floods, spot wildfires, and coordinate disaster relief. The United Nations considers the technology promising enough that it created the Global Initiative on Resilience to Natural Hazards through AI Solutions in 2024, to support research, develop standards, and explore AI use cases.
Meanwhile, the U.N. initiative Early Warnings for All is using AI to make sure that by 2027, every person on earth will be protected by early warning systems for extreme weather and climate-related events. Emergency management agencies have also started using natural language processing (NLP) to translate warnings and alerts into different languages.
Let’s look at a few ways other companies and nonprofits are using AI for disaster management.
It can help first responders after hurricanes
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene swept across the southeastern U.S., causing at least 250 deaths and $78.7 billion in damages.
So many people were stranded that first responders weren’t sure where to go first. They also didn’t know which areas were safe to enter. Amazon, which has a disaster relief program, deployed drones to accelerate search-and-rescue operations. The drones snapped 32,000 images of 2,700 acres along the Nolichucky River in Tennessee and North Carolina.
Amazon then used AI to analyze the photos, create maps, and identify the most important areas to search. This reduced rescue times from days to hours and kept first responders safe.
The nonprofit GiveDirectly, which lets donors send money to people in poverty, also used AI to help distribute relief checks after the hurricane.
Using one AI tool to locate the areas hit hardest and another to compare those findings with poverty data, GiveDirectly identified the households most in need. The nonprofit invited them to enroll in a relief program through their smartphones and quickly gave them $1,000, which they could use as they wished.
The only glitch: People without smartphones couldn’t access the program, so not everyone who needed help received it. But by using technology, the nonprofit could deliver aid in “as streamlined and dignified a way as possible,” Laura Keen, a senior program manager at GiveDirectly, told the Associated Press.
AI can alert people ahead of time about flooding
One of the most exciting ways AI is being used for disaster management is that it can help predict extreme weather-related events before they happen, so people have time to prepare.
That’s what the Google Research team was aiming for when it developed a model to forecast riverbank floods. Google’s model uses AI to analyze two forms of publicly available data: Its hydrologic model forecasts the amount of water flowing in a river, and its inundation model predicts which areas will be affected by heavy rains and how high the water level will be. By combining the two, Google can predict where and when riverbanks will flood.
The system can also alert people up to a week in advance of the flooding. Google works closely with governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to provide early warnings using the forecasts. In 2024 alone, the system sent out more than 1,100 crisis alerts. All of this information is available for free in Google’s Flood Hub, which covers river basins across the globe and keeps over 2 billion people informed of significant flooding from riverbanks. The forecasts are updated daily.
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It can prevent large wildfires
In the past, communities relied on traditional methods such as 911 calls to identify wildfires. Once alerted, first responders rushed into fast-moving wildfires with almost no real-time data or a shared map of where the fire was moving.
AI is changing that. The technology can now be used to detect fires shortly after they ignite, giving firefighters a chance to extinguish them before they rage out of control.
Here are a few ways AI is being used to prevent fires.
Pano AI uses wildfire detection stations and AI
California-based Pano AI has trained the technology to detect smoke, pinpoint its location, and provide real-time images and maps to first responders. If that sounds easy, think again. “Training AI to reliably detect wildfire smoke is an extremely difficult problem to solve,” said Sonia Kastner, CEO of Pano AI. “Smoke isn’t a fixed object. It shifts in shape, color, and opacity, depending on weather, lightning, and terrain.”
The company has positioned wildfire detection stations, equipped with cameras, in high-risk areas across 30 million acres in the U.S., Australia, and Canada. The technology uses billions of images to give AI a baseline for what “normal” looks like, so it can detect anomalies like smoke.
Pano AI has already identified hundreds of wildfires and provided firefighters with the maps and information they need to save lives. It’s done this work, in part, through an investment from Salesforce. The startup is part of the Salesforce Ventures Impact Fund, which invests in mission-driven, for-profit companies.
FireSat employs satellites and AI
Meanwhile, Google Research is part of the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance — other partners include the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation and Muon Space — that has developed FireSat, a satellite constellation solely dedicated to detecting and tracking wildfires.
FireSat collects advanced infrared images of Earth and will use AI to compare current images with thousands of prior images taken in the same spot. It will also factor in other data, like local weather, to determine whether there’s a fire.
The system’s first satellite was launched from California in March 2025, and quickly demonstrated its capabilities by detecting a small fire not seen by other satellite systems. When it reaches full operating capability, FireSat will provide global, high-resolution imagery that’s updated every 20 minutes, letting users detect wildfires as small as 5×5 meters, or roughly the size of a one-car garage. “Earth Fire Alliance, Google and our partners are on track to have three more satellites up and running by early 2027,” said Google.org’s Giving Lead Brian Juhyuk Lee.
FireSat will also provide scientists and wildfire authorities with an unprecedented, worldwide dataset to predict wildfires and improve wildfire behavior modeling.
The human touch: How AI helps most with disaster management
What’s the best consequence of using AI for disaster management? It frees up time for humans to take care of humans.
That was the case for Good360 during the LA wildfires. By using Agentforce, the nonprofit saved its disaster relief team 1,000 hours of work last year, which meant staffers could spend less time in front of their computers and more time on the ground.
Usually, the first few weeks after a disaster are such a whirlwind of activity that the team can’t leave the office. “But within a couple of days of the LA wildfires, someone from Good360 was on the ground with the recovery and response team,” said Stephane Moulec, the nonprofit’s chief technology officer. “We got to be in front of people, which meant they knew we were involved, but because we were in the field with responders, we also learned a ton and were better able to see what people wanted and needed.”
Or to put it more simply: Humans were able to do what they do best, courtesy of AI.
