The April 4, 2022 report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes it clear that it is "now or never" for the planet. We are "firmly on track toward an unlivable world," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in releasing the report. There's every chance that global temperatures will soar by 3 degrees Celsius, twice as much as the agreed-upon 1.5 C limit. Unless we take drastic steps and cut down emissions by 43 percent within this decade, the full force of this existential threat will be upon us. In this context, it is interesting that some researchers have taken artificial intelligence--a technology often considered an existential threat in its own right– and tried to turn it into a vehicle for climate action.

What if we could treat the Earth like a computer, a system with an ever-flowing set of data that can be tracked, analyzed, and potentially even predicted. That's the gist of Microsoft's latest environmental initiative, which it's dubbed a "Planetary Computer." The company foresees a world where we can track just about anything happening in the world -- a forest fire in California, the river tides in Uganda -- and have all of that data readily accessible on a single AI-driven platform. If Microsoft succeeds it could reshape our relationship with the Earth entirely. Lucas Joppa, Microsoft's first chief environmental officer, boiled down the concept succinctly in an interview for the Engadget Podcast: "It's a platform that is intended to accelerate our ability to monitor, model and then ultimately manage Earth's natural systems to ask questions like, 'Where are the world's forests? Where are the world's wetlands? How fast are they changing?' And hopefully, what are the sorts of benefits that we are gaining from those ecosystems? What are the services that those ecosystems provision to people?"

"The species of the world are connected with each other. I think that's actually one of the lessons, the real reminders, if you will, of the year 2020, as we all live every day with the issues obviously created by COVID-19," observed Microsoft President Brad Smith, during a video launch Wednesday for the company's latest sustainability push -- an ambitious initiative to support global biodiversity. Smith's remarks, of course, refer to the links tracing the novel coronavirus back to animal origins, a phenomenon that has become far more common as humankind encroaches on forests, wetlands and other habitats. During the modern era, Smith noted, wetlands that purify and store water for thousands of species have been reduced by 87 percent while coral reefs have declined by 50 percent -- data points explored in the United Nations' first global assessment (PDF) of ecosystems and biodiversity published in 2019. An estimated one-quarter of species are threatened with extinction, which could amplify the collapse of other habitats.