3 Ways AI Can Help Fight Climate Change

While the potential for AI to help fight climate change is often overlooked, there are many ways that AI can be used to address climate concerns. From reducing emissions to developing new renewable energy sources, AI gives us new climate tech tools for the fight.

Computer modeling via AI is a useful tool in predicting, mitigating, and influencing individual and organizational behaviors, reducing the negative aspects of the overall impact humans have on the earth’s environment.

Before we dive into three of the ways AI can help fight climate change, let’s first ensure we have a grasp on what exactly we mean by the term “AI.”

What Is AI?

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the ability of a computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings (that’s us!) in human-like ways.

There are certain tasks and processes that computers do better than humans already. (If you bristle at that idea, try doing a little long division by hand—then remember that even the most basic of computers from 50 years ago could do far more advanced math instantly.)

But computers have not traditionally been very good at other behaviors humans do easily—like identifying objects in photographs.

At the risk of oversimplifying, AI bridges the gap between the two, melding human-like approaches with raw processing power to accomplish exciting things.

For example, AI can take vast amounts of historical and current data and churn through it at a scale humans can’t, turning it into streamlined predictions for future events. Along with machine-based learning, AI employs algorithms to find patterns in structured data and even process unstructured data such as pictures, maps, and graphs. These images may come from satellites, weather balloons, or radar.

What Is Climate Change?

Climate change, while a politically charged word for many, refers to measurable changes in global or regional climate patterns, especially looking at patterns and changes from the mid-to-late 20th century onward. These patterns are thought to be strongly linked to the levels of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere via the burning of fossil fuels in many industrial processes.

As we adapt to a changing climate, AI is already predicting specific increases in wildfires, floods, storms, deforestation effects, droughts, and other environmental events.

But what if AI could do more than predict? What if it could identify new technologies or alternative approaches, or show us how to alter behaviors to avoid the worst outcomes of human-caused climate change?

There are promising signs that AI will help us in these kinds of proactive ways, not just predictive ones.

Let’s look at three of the main ways AI is currently being developed and deployed in efforts to mitigate climate change.

Reducing Emissions With AI

Humans use fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas — to produce energy, but the emissions generated contribute to what’s known as the greenhouse effect, where increases of particular gases in our planet’s atmosphere trap the sun’s energy as excess heat.

One of the ways AI can help with climate change issues involves simply reducing the emissions required to do the things we need to do. By optimizing supply chains from raw materials to finished products, better predicting consumers’ needs, and shipping goods more efficiently, we can reduce the “emissions of consumption.”

These kinds of optimizations require crunching staggering quantities of data — exactly the thing AI is good at, and humans are not.

Water Management With AI

In a changing climate, drought is a growing concern in many areas. Water conservation is vital to these regions both during and potentially in prevention of water crises.

Water management takes a great deal of insight and planning. AI can certainly be employed in water conservation efforts, as intelligent irrigation systems can be installed to optimize watering schedules to lower consumption and monitor real-time use.

AI can help manage water resources more efficiently by predicting the risk of floods, droughts, and other natural disasters and providing business solutions for sustainable water management.

Urban Planning With AI

Urban planning affects how people will live, work, commute, and enjoy free time in a town, city, or metropolitan area. Urban planners consider economics, geography, environmental impact, public administration, social function, and more as they integrate architecture, landscape, infrastructure, zoning, and more into a cohesive plan.

Preserving natural ecosystems within urban planning can go a long way toward mitigating climate-related challenges. Areas containing forests and wetlands which host algae remove carbon dioxide naturally, but they must be left in their natural state to do so. Monitoring the health and capability of these areas involves a great deal of data, which AI can process and aid in further decisions and planning.

Within building designs, themselves are opportunities to take advantage of AI. Intelligent sensors in buildings can conserve energy in heating, cooling, and ventilation systems, improve power storage options, optimize renewable energy usage, implement industrial or technological means of removing excess carbon dioxide, and explore solutions for further advancements in future systems.

AI proves useful in analyzing large amounts of historical data and using it to predict future trends. As we look to the future, we envision deeper AI integration into the infrastructure of communities, helping people become conscious of usage, reduce emissions, and remove more carbon dioxide from the environment.