Disaster Prevention and Climate Resilience: How AI Helps Us Save the Planet From Ourselves

pcmag.com:

Much of the conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) these days centers on whether it will eventually take your job, how it’s trying to compete with humans in creative fields, or how it can be misused, say, as a writing tool. You can probably chalk this one-sidedness up to an all-too-human tendency to be suspicious of new tech that isn't well understood by the mainstream (yet).

But AI isn't intrinsically evil or good: It's a tool, a vast technology with enormous potential, and there are myriad ways to implement it beyond the current discourse. One vitally important use case is helping us fight and survive the consequences of climate change.

Whether it’s mitigating the effects of disasters such as floods and fires more quickly or building a cleaner energy grid, the evidence is mounting that AI has an essential role to play in helping to protect us as the planet reacts to climate change. And we’ll need all the help we can get. Scientific evidence(Opens in a new window) makes it more clear than ever that we need to reduce our global carbon footprint, or we’ll make the Earth uninhabitable. 

Countries including the US, Australia, and Kenya have developed climate-change-mitigation tools that use AI. A 2022 report(Opens in a new window) from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) states unequivocally that “AI is essential to solving the climate crisis.” BCG surveyed 1,005 “global leaders” in AI and climate change for the report, and 87% of them regard AI as a tool we should be using to mitigate the effects of global warming. This comes on top of reports from agencies such as the IPCC(Opens in a new window), the UN(Opens in a new window), and countless others stating that climate change is a real and existential—but not