World Environment Day 2022 is round the corner, led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and held annually on the 5th of June since 1973; it has grown to be the largest global platform for environmental outreach. The host for this year is in Sweden. "Only One Earth" is the campaign slogan, with the focus on "Living Sustainably in Harmony with Nature".

Today, climate change is one of the most pressing issues confronting humanity, with its consequences becoming increasingly obvious. Storms, droughts, floods, and fires have become more common, global systems are altering, and growing urbanisation, the industrial revolution, and greenhouse gas emissions are causing worldwide catastrophes.

In his own words, Bill Gates summarised the kind of damage climate change will inflict as "To understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and spread the pain out over a much longer period."

AI for a better environment

While AI is already having a good impact on the environment throughout the world, businesses could do more. By offering opportunities to communicate what's working, businesses and organisations could share data and maximise their use of natural resources. Simultaneously, AI could aid in the development of a more profitable framework for firms that use natural resources. Machine learning allows systems to detect minute changes in data, identify anomalies in real-time, and adjust to ensure that organisations waste as little as possible.

India has made its commitment clear at the COP 26 climate action summit to achieve 'net zero' emissions by 2070. The country needs accelerated efforts toward achieving this goal. A group of promising startups have emerged to support this cause and are applying new-gen tech to combat climate change and provide resilience. We have curated a list of AI startups working in this domain:

Blue Sky Analytics

Founded in 2019 by Abhilasha Purwar and Kshitij Purwar, Blue Sky Analytics is a climate-tech startup that uses satellite-derived climate intelligence to help investors make better financial decisions. The company provides global data solutions across multiple environmental indicators such as GHG and carbon emissions, flood, wildfire, heat risk, drought, wildfire, and much more, using their own AI and ML models. This data could be used for a variety of purposes, such as monitoring and quantifying physical climate risks of various assets, computing climate VaR, and stress testing for various warming scenarios.

Take, for instance, Zuri β, a crop fire monitoring system from the company. Version 0 of Zuri came shortly after, with district-level data on fire count across India. The platform helps governments and regulatory authorities to act in an informed manner.

SatSure

The Bangalore-based startup was founded in 2017 by the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) alumni Prateep Basu, Rashmit Singh Sukhmani, and Abhishek Raju. SatSure leverages satellite remote sensing data, machine learning, and big data analytics to solve large-scale issues in the fields of agriculture, banking and finance, infrastructure, and climate change mitigation.

"As a responsible global citizen, SatSure takes its commitment to the SDGs very seriously, and our solutions broadly address 14 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals surrounding the themes of food security, water security, and bio-sphere security, amongst others," says the company in a blog.

Bert Labs

Founded in 2017 by Rohit Kochar, Bert Labs is a deep tech company solving some of the pressing challenges by ensuring efficient use of available resources through its patented AI-IoT technologies. As per the company, it has proven solutions in the space of efficiency improvements in energy, production, and supply chain across industrial and commercial establishments. 

Bangalore-based Bert Labs' proprietary "Bert Platform Solution" focuses on the energy, production, supply chain planning, logistics efficiency, and carbon footprint reduction. In addition, the company wants to expand its innovation, product, and platform portfolio and expand its global footprint.

To conclude, AI has the potential to both benefit and harm the environment. Companies employ artificial intelligence to improve production efficiency and reduce energy costs, but training AI takes a lot of time, effort and, most importantly, a lot of energy for consumption.