Introduction
APIs, or application programming interfaces, are a crucial component of this shift. Air quality APIs assist monitors the quality of air and water, revealing carbon emissions data, or enable smart interconnections that share essential environmental knowledge worldwide by powering the software underpinning many new green measures. Today, we’ll look at attempts to promote a green Internet and green APIs that programmers can use in their apps to promote sustainability and assist reduce adverse environmental impact from a global to a consumer level.
AMBEE API
AMBEE provides data & solutions for supply chain sustainability and intelligence. The AMBEE API track API provides information on 20 million businesses, covering financial risk, carbon efficiency ratings, carbon emissions, contact information, and environmental ratings. The AMBEE API also provides modeling for energy use and carbon emissions for activities such as transportation, electricity, and manufacturing processes.
What is API-Driven Development’s Benefits?
APIs give apps a new level of modularity. APIs enable programmers to take advantage of the knowledge of other apps. When it comes to authentication, communication, payment systems, and maps, a company no longer needs to reinvent the wheel when developing an application.
Developers can instead take advantage of air quality APIs’ seamless plug-in capabilities and functionality. Weather APIs enable applications and software components to connect to internal and external networks.
They’ve become crucial to businesses’ efforts to make corporate applications and services available to customers, partners, vendors, and other third parties via the Internet.
Are APIs Safe?
Inquiring about the security of weather APIs is like inquiring about web app security. The simple answer is that it depends entirely on deployment & life cycle management. Air quality APIs can indeed be secure, but security holes are common owing to the volume and complexity of APIs. Like many other aspects of cybersecurity, API defenders must get defense right every time, but an attacker needs one flaw to breach a system.
An organization’s APIs can connect dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of internal apps to one another and the external world. If air quality APIs are not adequately secured, they can provide a direct conduit from outside to an organization’s vital data and applications. The issue is that API use outpaces enterprises’ ability to secure or manage them.
A business may have spent a lot of time and money building firewalls, segmentation, vulnerability monitoring programs, and other security features, but if its APIs are vulnerable, an attacker can get around many common security protections. An exposed, unsecure API could result in a significant security breach. It’s a recipe for disaster if you don’t effectively handle the safety of your APIs. It could lead to a huge security breach.
Manage, Monitor, and Test APIs
- APIs must be managed, monitored, and tested by businesses. APIs must be handled from the beginning to the end of their life cycle.
- You won’t be able to safeguard APIs if you don’t know what you have.
- To detect attacks, API traffic must be monitored.
Finally, weather APIs must be thoroughly tested. APIs must not only be fully tested but they must also be evaluated for business logic problems due to their unique nature.
Auditing business logic defects entails an adversarial examination of an API’s features and functionalities. This entails attempting to leverage an API’s functionality for nefarious purposes. Since your application is in production, don’t be hesitant to undertake this testing.
One interesting experiment is to run your company’s vulnerability scans on a purposefully vulnerable API. Build up a secure testing environment with a weak API, such as OWASP’s crAPI, and assess how effective your vulnerability scanning is against it. The top API security flaws are found in vulnerable devices like crAPI.
If your scanner fails to find the flaws in a purposefully susceptible application, you must look for better solutions to evaluate APIs for flaws.
APIs Designed to Reduce Carbon Footprint in Transportation
- Some APIs enable people to make decisions about how to minimize their carbon footprint:
- The Open Charge Map is a global public electric vehicle charging stations registry. The expanding non-profit community maps nearby charging stations and makes the data available via an API for developers to use in their applications.
- The Walkscore app from Redfin takes a city or area and calculates average walk scores. The Walkscore APIs could be used to integrate data services into third-party programs, such as walk score, bike score, transport score, and more.
- The Brighter Planet API allows programs to assess the impact on the environment of a wide range of activities and modes of transportation, with carbon and energy impact measurement for vehicles and airplanes via a RESTful API with JSON and XML outputs.
Reducing Consumption at Home
Many APIs can be used to construct software that reduces household consumption:
- The Genability APIs provide detailed estimates of power consumption and costs to lower consumption and expenses while encouraging homeowners to choose smart energy providers.
- The Home Energy Saver API, a US Department of Energy-funded program to assist homeowners and home energy providers.
Global Energy, Air, & Water Quality Monitoring
Sensors and IoT devices serve a critical role in tracking energy use, as well as water quality and air pollution monitoring:
- For example, Air Quality Egg combines consumer sensors to build a community-driven global air quality index that is publicly accessible to developers via an API.
- On GitHub, development speed has created a REST API that aggregates air quality data via DustDuino devices.
- The City of Chicago has a water quality data stream program that gives users access to information such as water temperature or turbidity, among other things.
- The Breezometer API provides access to a global database of air quality data.
- The US Energy Information Administration maintains an active API that allows developers to read a massive amount of data about energy usage in the US.
APIs promote renewable energy through data and education.
Some tools focus on estimating financial savings and environmental advantages from renewable energy system installation. Clean Power Research develops data-driven interactive applications for the space. The Power Bill API analyzes energy value, the Clean Power Estimator API provides financial analysis for solar installations, and the Solar Anywhere API provides irradiance data (sunlight projections depending on geographic positioning) that may be integrated into apps that promote solar alternatives.
“APIs play a critical role in enabling the expansion of distributed generation energy sources such as solar by providing access to rate and incentive math, solar resource data, and other tools, streamlining quoting and sales, and allowing incentive and connectedness application processes to be integrated.”
References
https://www.mossadams.com/articles/2021/09/how-an-api-works
https://nordicapis.com/green-apis-promote-sustainability-and-climate-action/
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/ambitious-environmental-protection-benefits-health
