Sylvain Duranton is the global leader of BCG GAMMA, an entity of the Boston Consulting Group dedicated to AI, Data Science and Advanced Analytics applied to business. His keynote at XperienceAI '21 focussed on the impact of AI on saving the planet. He spoke on the role that AI plays to reduce and measure CO2 emissions as well as support city planning and forecasting.

In his words, "Since my experience with deforestation and many other projects on similar topics, I am now convinced that AI impact matters to save our planet." In his presentation, he highlighted three ways in which AI can have a major contribution to climate change. These are:

• AI can help measure and reduce emissions of any institution: Many companies are now committing that they will massively reduce their emissions and even become carbon neutral or net zero within the next two or three decades. The reality, however, is that most companies today can hardly measure their real emissions. Therefore, to make their commitments credible it's most important to build some credible measurement tools. AI can help on that front by helping to build emissions roadmaps which are more accurate and more dynamic than the ones currently used by many companies. Best practice companies, therefore, are using AI to combine what they know about their own, their clients’ and their suppliers’ operations. But most importantly, AI is being used to connect to external databases, which gives very granular assessment of what the emissions are related to one type of activity in one given country. This helps to simulate, with great accuracy, the carbon footprint of the goods they purchase, supply, or manufacture, combining the external and internal data sources into dynamic dashboards which can be adjusted.
• AI can enable very disruptive and innovative business models which can help the planet: Carbon sequestration through agriculture is a very promising approach and AI has three roles there. The first one is to identify which soils are most likely to sequestrate a lot of carbon. The whole process is costly to set up so you have to be very selective about deploying it. The best way to know where it matters is to learn from data from existing carbon sequestration operation with agriculture and combining it will ML and physical models – and then pick the best soils. Secondly, AI is a way to reduce the cost of measuring the amount of carbon in the soil. Given the high cost of this measurement, AI is a major enabler for the financial model behind carbon sequestration with AI. Thirdly, AI can be used for satellite imagery, for instance, to ensure that the farmers comply to change of sowing practices that they have committed to the people who are investing in the process and expecting to be able to sell the CO2 certificates later. So clearly, AI will play an absolutely critical role to scale and deploy carbon sequestration with agriculture around the globe. 
• AI can help improve the resilience to climate hazard of our societies: Adapting our societies to climate change is a major challenge and AI can aid tremendously by helping manage the wide variety, diversity and volumes of data. Social data and economic data, as well as an understanding of the infrastructure, telecom, electricity and transportation networks is needed to identify the most critical vulnerabilities in a given society, city, or company. For instance, one of the teams of BCG Gamma has worked in Australia to help fight against bush fires. AI has been used to identify those areas and assess the impact of different measures. AI enables very targeted investment in the fire protection infrastructure, identification of the most vulnerable communities and procuring equipment for such accidents.

Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay