Different parts of the globe are experiencing distinct climate challenges -- severe drought, dangerous flooding, reduced biodiversity or dense air pollution. The challenges are so great that no country can solve them on their own. But innovative startups worldwide are lighting the way, demonstrating how these daunting challenges can be better understood and addressed with AI. Here's how five -- all among the 10,000 members of NVIDIA Inception, a program designed to nurture cutting-edge startups -- are looking out for the environment using NVIDIA-accelerated applications: India-based Blue Sky Analytics is building a geospatial intelligence platform that harnesses satellite data for environmental monitoring and climate risk assessment. The company provides developers with climate datasets to analyze air quality and estimate greenhouse gas emissions from fires -- with additional datasets in the works to forecast future biomass fires and monitor water capacity in lakes, rivers and glacial melts.

Healthy Soil Biomes (HSB) and StoryFile have launched an AI-powered conversational video experience with five experts to provide the public with engaging resources on how to create healthy farming methods. Just in time for Earth Day, these methods can help mitigate global issues like food/water scarcity and climate change. For the first time, StoryFile has networked multiple people's StoryFiles and utilized its powerful AI-tool, Conversa, to let users have a conversation that can move between five Healthy Soil Biomes experts according to their area of expertise in areas such as bioreactors, farming, soil, and biodiversity. This revolutionary technology is the basis of Video 3.0, which allows for interactive asynchronous conversational video. Over 7,000 questions were asked of the Healthy Soil Biomes experts.

Coral reefs are an essential element in our global ecosystem, offering shelter to a quarter of marine life and providing a food source, income, and coastal buffer to over 500 million people across the globe. Yet because of rising ocean temperatures, which results in coral bleaching (check out TechRepublic's coverage of how tech is helping protect the Great Barrier Reef) as well as overfishing and reckless coastal development, coral reefs are endangered: Half of the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Today, to celebrate the 50th annual Earth Day, Intel, Accenture, and the Sulubaaï Environmental Foundation (SEF) present Project: CORaiL. The joint initiative will use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) "to monitor, recreate, and restore coral reefs," according to the release. To gauge the reef health, Project: CORail calculated the number and type of fish in a reef.

With nearly 160 million hectares, India is home to the second largest concentration of agricultural land in the world -- which means inefficiencies in pesticide applications can quickly escalate into significant environmental issues. Farmers often pump a cocktail of chemicals into crops in hopes of warding off pests and diseases. But this comes at a cost to them, as well as the ecosystem. Enter Plant Pathologist, an IoT-based project devised by IBM's India Research Lab designed to help small-scale farmers better care for their crops. In a 2017 pilot program, farmers sent cell phone pictures of ailing plants to an AI model that used machine vision to identify the hallmarks of disease. Researchers paired these insights with forecasted Weather Company data to predict when certain pest or disease attacks might occur.

Apple has created a new robot – not for building products, but for ripping iPhones apart. The robot, named Daisy, can take nine different iPhones models apart and extract the important parts of them, in ways traditional recyclers cannot. They can then be used all over again, helping to cut wastage out of the process of making phones. The new announcement is part of Apple's broad plans for Earth Day, the event held on 22 April each year to mark green efforts. It also said that it would encourage people to recycle more of their phones, so that they can be broken up by Daisy: for every iPhone handed in until 30 April through its GiveBack recycling scheme, it will make a donation to Conservation International.

Looks like Liam, Apple's phone-dismembering robot, now has a little sister. Just ahead of Earth Day, the Cupertino-based company revealed the newest member of its robo-recycling team: Daisy. Like her predecessor, Daisy was developed by Apple's in-house R&D team and even leverages some of the same components that were initially created for Liam. The new robot is tasked with disassembling iphones, stripping them of their reusable parts and sorting out the refuse. Daisy is reportedly capable of dismantling nine different iPhone variants and stripping up to 200 handsets an hour, all without damaging any of the salvageable parts.

Researchers are now using AI, game theory and big data to protect wildlife and forests around the world, as technology finally catches up with poachers. The fight against poaching has proven very difficult in the past century, that's despite the advances in technology that have littered conservationism in that time. However, that could all be about to change thanks to a bit of clever thinking, with game theory and big data combining to arm park rangers with the necessary tools to fight back. The problem for park rangers is often scale, far too much land is monitored, on foot, by far too few. This means poachers have a relatively free reign, knowing the odds of the park ranger being at the right place, at the right time, is slim.

From a huge effort to help kids realize their potential to a celebration of our dear old planet, this week brought plenty of interesting and inspiring news around Microsoft. We've rounded up some of the highlights in this latest edition of Weekend Reading. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced grants to 100 nonprofit partners in 55 countries as part of YouthSpark, a global initiative to increase access for young people to learn computer science. In turn, these nonprofit partners -- such as Laboratoria, CoderDojo and City Year -- will use the power of local schools, businesses and community organizations to empower students to achieve more for themselves, their families and their communities. The nonprofits will build upon the work that Microsoft already has underway through programs like Hour of Code with Code.org,