AI could become our ‘Swiss Army knife’ in the fight against climate change
The UN IPCC report, released at the time when various climate catastrophes were in news, said that the human-driven climate crisis is well under way allowing “no time for delay and no room for excuses”. Recognizing the urgency to act, a fast-growing number of businesses around the world pledged to take science-based climate action and to accelerate the global fight against climate change.
Application of AI in the field of climate action:
It’s now time to embrace progress of AI and utilise the full power of AI to help accelerate fight against climate change.
1. Measure and reduce emissions at scale for any given institution:
For a company to master its climate impact, it needs to take three steps: measure the baseline accurately, set targets, and act.
Too often, companies are blocked at the first step. The latest data from the CDP shows that only 31% of companies, which publicly disclose their emissions footprint, measure their impact exhaustively across all relevant categories.
- As a result, companies struggle to move forward with meaningful targets and successful action plans.
Innovative AI-based solutions can enable companies to tackle the three steps, empowering the full organization to make the best decisions regarding its climate impact.
- Solutions, such as BCG’s CO2 AI, create a 30% reduction in emissions.
Powerful AI-based forecasts and simulations empower leaders to take the right choices to reduce emissions at scale and impactfully drive their climate journey.
For example,
- Insights generated by BCG’s CO2 AI increased confidence in the achievability of a net zero target and helped accelerate the timeline to net zero by 10 years.
- Google with electricity Map manages to align computing tasks with times of low-carbon electricity supply in the grid and, thus, reduces CO2e emissions from electricity consumption.
AI-based Optimisation of process parameters helps identify untapped potentials to save both greenhouse gas emissions and cost.
- 10% of CO2 emissions and 1% of costs could be saved by employing state-of-the-art AI models to streamline carbon-intensive industrial operations.
2. Enabling innovative business models to help the climate:
Over the past years, global research has made strong progress in the development of innovative carbon abatement technologies that includes:
Lower carbon fuels: Smart AI-based algorithms can help identify the best-suited lands and soils in a very cost-efficient and scalable way.
- By learning from existing carbon sequestration action data and analyzing vast agricultural, meteorological, and geological databases.
Engineered carbon capture and storage: AI can help to perform large-scale carbon measurement in the soil at a low cost. It is a major enabler for the financial model behind agricultural carbon sequestration.
Agricultural carbon sequestration: AI can be used with satellite imagery to ensure that farmers comply with sowing practice changes committed to the people investing in the process and expecting to sell the CO2 certificates later.
3. Improves resilience of our societies to climate hazards:
Destructions have proven that adapting societies to climate change is a major challenge.
AI can aid by helping manage the wide variety, diversity, and volumes of data, and generating life-saving insights to improve resilience.
- Google’s “Hydro net” solution can help identify the most critical vulnerabilities in the case of extreme river floods with unprecedented lead times and accuracy.
- It is utilized to improve flood forecasting in India and Bangladesh, covering more than 250 million people at risk.
AI-based solutions can help pro-actively map out crisis mitigation and contingency plans and effectively deploy help when needed.
- A BCG GAMMA team used AI to help fight the bush fires in Australia. AI accurately identified the vulnerable areas and reliably assessed the impact of different measures.
AI is a uniquely powerful tool that offers the potential to exponentially speed up the global climate response. It is now in the hands of global business leaders to effectively leverage AI’s strengths and utilise them to tackle the most complex challenges obstructing these companies from reducing emissions at scale.
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