With the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) report painting a worrying picture of our battle against climate change, we will explore five ways analytics can help turn the tide. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, called the report "a code red for humanity," adding that "the alarm bells are deafening and evidence irrefutable." U.S. President Joe Biden said about it, "The cost of inaction is mounting." In summary, without immediate action, the damage we've done may be irreversible. For this to change, we're going to have to rely on the latest tools and technologies, including big data, advanced analytics, modeling, and simulation techniques.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT, big data, augmented and virtual reality, and 3D and 4D printing are becoming essential and familiar elements in …

AI Researcher, Cognitive Technologist Inventor - AI Thinking, Think Chain Innovator - AIOT, XAI, Autonomous Cars, IIOT Founder Fisheyebox Spatial Computing Savant, Transformative Leader, Industry X.0 Practitioner The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices worldwide is forecast to almost triple from 8.74 billion in 2020 to more than 25.4 billion IoT devices in 2030. In order to stabilize climate change, we need to hold Earth's temperature at 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. This means we need to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and reach net zero before 2050. On the frontline of digitalization lies 5G, itself an exponential technology, a platform enabling technologies such as #artificialintelligence (AI), blockchain, the internet of things (#IoT), quantum computing and extended reality (XR). The solutions are not hypothetical, they just need to be scaled up.

The planet is faced with overwhelming environmental problems. Rising environmental pollution is wreaking havoc on nature and endangering the lives of millions of humans. Evolving digital technologies offer a bottom-up solution to tackling climate change. These digital technologies have a revolutionary way to involve citizens in addressing local and global issues. Young people are generally the most worried regarding the consequences of climate change. Early findings of ongoing projects suggest a high potential for leveraging digital technology in joint measures to preserve the world for ourselves and future generations.

Climate change is the biggest challenge facing the planet. It will need every solution possible, including technology like artificial intelligence (AI). Seeing a chance to help the cause, some of the biggest names in AI and machine learning--a discipline within the field--recently published a paper called "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning." The paper, which was discussed at a workshop during a major AI conference in June, was a "call to arms" to bring researchers together, said David Rolnick, a University of Pennsylvania postdoctoral fellow and one of the authors. "It's surprising how many problems machine learning can meaningfully contribute to," says Rolnick, who also helped organize the June workshop. The paper offers up 13 areas where machine learning can be deployed, including energy production, CO2 removal, education, solar geoengineering, and finance.

While artificial intelligence (AI) is often associated with the spawning of robots that will take our jobs, Terminator's Skynet, or the unblinking red eyes of Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, its true and immediate effects are best seen by simply observing the innovations -- ones that prove that software can do a variety of tasks better than humans can. If one thing is clear, it's that artificial intelligence has the potential to disrupt every industry, which leads to a big question that should matter to all of us: To what extent can a powerful technology like artificial intelligence be used to help us tackle climate change? To learn more about how we can leverage artificial intelligence to tackle climate change, I had to chat with Priya Donti, who's completing a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, focused on the role machine learning can play in climate change mitigation solutions. Donti is also a co-chair of Climate Change AI, an organization that unites "volunteers from academia and industry who believe in using machine learning, where it is relevant, to help tackle the climate crisis." Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, discusses the risks, the rewards, and the limitations of using artificial intelligence to combat climate change.

At the Tackling Climate Change workshop at this year's NeurIPS conference, some of the top minds in machine learning came together to discuss the effects of climate change on life on Earth, how AI can tackle the urgent problem, and why and how the machine learning community should join the fight. The panel included Yoshua Bengio, MILA director and University of Montreal professor; Jeff Dean, Google's AI chief; Andrew Ng, cofounder of Google Brain and founder of Landing.ai; and Cornell University professor and Institute for Computational Sustainability director Carla Gomes. The Tackling Climate Change workshop explored a wide range of topics, from the use of deep reinforcement learning to improve performance for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft to the application of deep learning to predict wildfire risk, detect avalanche deposits, improve plane efficiency with better wind forecasts, and conduct a global census of solar farms. The workshop is put together by Climate Change AI, a group that hosts workshops at AI research conferences and a forum for collaboration between machine learning practitioners and people from other fields. One essential step in better addressing the world's pressing challenges, says Bengio, is changing the way AI research is valued.

Climate change is the most important crisis the planet is facing today. Millions of people from all over the world took to the streets recently demanding urgent governmental action to help control the ongoing catastrophe and reverse the negative impact of climate change. We will need to marshal all our resources, including Artificial Intelligence to save our planet from peril. Some of the foremost minds in machine learning and artificial intelligence recently published a study where they outlined 13 crucial areas where machine learning can be used to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change. The recommendations they made were divided into three major categories – high leverage solutions, where machine learning can make a noticeable impact, long term solutions that will take at least a couple of decades to pay off, and finally, high risk pursuits, where the technology is either not mature enough or we don't know enough to effectively predict the consequences.

A week ago today, millions of students took to the streets to protest the lack of action governments are taking to combat climate change. On Monday, 16-year-old Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg made an intense and emotionally charged speech at the United Nations, begging world leaders to step up their commitment to protecting the planet's future. Headlines around the world echo her rallying cry, accusing our leaders of failing us. I wholeheartedly agree that governments can, and should, do more to confront climate change. But I have been equally curious about how cutting-edge technology is being used to fight and shelter against the effects of global warming.

AI can also unlock new insights from the massive amounts of complex climate simulations generated by the field of climate modeling, which has come a long way since the first system was created at Princeton in the 1960s. Of the dozens of models that have since come into existence, all represent atmosphere, oceans, land, cryosphere, or ice. But, even with agreement on basic scientific assumptions, Claire Monteleoni, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a co-founder of climate informatics, points out that while the models generally agree in the short term, differences emerge when it comes to long-term forecasts.