AI can help address many environmental challenges through applications such as detecting deforestation, monitoring ocean health, enabling smart agriculture, improving weather forecasting and disaster response, reducing traffic and optimizing transportation. However, AI systems also have substantial energy and carbon footprints. There are also risks such as a lack of explainability, deep learning errors, security and control issues, economic risks and potential unethical outcomes. Overall, AI shows promise for environmental sustainability goals if developed and applied responsibly.

1. Topic- Can Artificial Intelligence Help In
Enviornmental Sustainability
Presented by- Harman

2. What is Artificial Intelligence?
• Artificial Intelligence, or AI, as we
call it refers to the ability of any
machine or computer to mimic
human capabilities such as learning
from examples and experience,
recognizing objects, understanding
and responding to language,
making decisions, and solving
problems. Combining these
different capabilities, the machine
can perform complex functions
such as driving a car.

3. How AI Impacts Sustainable Development Goals
AI plays an important role in achieving not
only environmental but all other Sustainable
Development Goals- from ending hunger and
poverty to achieving sustainable energy and
gender equality to protecting and preserving
biodiversity.
There are a total of 17 Sustainable
Development Goals as defined by the United
Nations, that can be grouped under three
pillars: Environment, Economy and Society. A
study published in Nature Communications
looked at how the development of AI could
enable many advances, while also hampering
others.

4. AI to address Environmental Challenges: Opportunities
AI has the potential to accelerate
global efforts to protect the
environment and conserve resources
by detecting energy emission
reductions, CO2 removal, helping
develop greener transportation
networks, monitoring deforestation,
and predicting extreme weather
conditions. Below mentioned are
examples of how AI provides means
to tackle the most pressing
environmental challenges.

5. Climate Change
The technology is already being used
to send natural disaster alerts in
Japan, monitor deforestation in the
Amazon, and design greener smart
cities in China.
AI applications could also help design
more energy-efficient buildings,
improve power storage and optimise
renewable energy deployment by
feeding solar and wind power into the
electricity grid as needed.

6. Making cities more livable and sustainable
AI can also improve energy efficiency
on the city scale by incorporating data
from smart meters and the Internet of
Things to forecast energy demand.
One vision for a sustainable city is to
create an “urban dashboard” consisting
of real-time data on energy and water
use and availability, traffic and weather
to make cities more energy efficient
and livable

7. AI Can Have A Substantial Carbon Footprint
• AI-based systems are highly
compute-intensive. They must
process a great deal of data,
expanding the need for
servers and dependence on
energy to cool data centers.
The adoption of AI within a
corporation will increase the
company’s use of energy.

8. Smart agriculture
Global spending on smart, connected
agricultural technologies and systems,
including Aand I machine learning, is
projected to triple in revenue by 2025,
reaching $15.3 billion, according to BI
Intelligence Research.
Spending on AI technologies and
solutions alone in Agriculture is predicted
to grow from $1 billion in 2020 to $4
billion in 2026, attaining a Compound
Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.5%,
according to Markets&Markets.

9. Ocean Health
The Ocean Data Alliance is working with
machine learning to provide data from
satellites and ocean exploration so that
decision-makers can monitor shipping,
ocean mining, fishing, coral bleaching or
the outbreak of a marine disease. With
almost real time data, decision-makers
and authorities will be able to respond to
problems more quickly. Artificial
intelligence can also help predict the
spread of invasive species, follow marine
litter, monitor ocean currents, keep track
of dead zones and measure pollution
levels.

10. CLEAN AIR
• Air pollution is still a problem almost
everywhere, so researchers investigate
using AI to fight air pollution.
• People are taking a much keener
interest in the level of pollution near
their home and where they live.
Millions of people are adversely
affected by air pollution worldwide. Air
pollution and climate change
transcend national borders and the
only way to respond to these global
problems is with global solutions.A

11. Water issues
• Artificial Intelligence has seeped into every sector for good, making lives
easier and better. One such crucial sector which is benefitting from the
benefits of AI is the water industry. Water being the most essential natural
resource for human life is also available in a small amount. There is only 2.5%
of the earth’s water which is freshwater. And, out of the total, only 0.5% is
available freshwater, hence ringing an alarm for the need to conserve and
manage this natural resource better.

13. Weather Forecast and Disaster resiliency
• AI-powered predictive analytics along
with drones, advanced sensor platforms
and similar tools can monitor tremors,
floods, windstorms, sea-level changes,
and other possible natural hazards. This
technology can help government and
concerned agencies to take timely actions
and the availability of such information in
real-time with automated triggers can
enable early evacuations when needed.

14. In Transportation
• AI can help reduce traffic congestion,
improve the transport of cargo (supply
chain logistics), and enable more and
more autonomous driving capability. AI
will eventually help with the “last mile”
delivery problem and reduce the need for
delivery vehicles. AI can help businesses
with demand forecasting, helping to
reduce the amount of transport needed.
Companies in this sector include
Nutomony, Nauto and Sea Machines
Robotics.

15. Biodiversity and Conservation
• When combined with satellite
imagery, AI can detect changes in
land use, vegetation, forest cover,
and the fallout of natural disasters.
• Invasive species can be monitored,
identified and tracked using the
technology above, identifying and
tracking their presence, and
eliminating them is all done using
machine learning and computer
vision

16. What are the risks of artificial intelligence ?
• The World Economic Forum report
identified six categories of AI risk. The
black box conclusions of AI may not be
understandable to humans and thus it
may be impossible to determine if they
are accurate or desirable. Deep
learning could be risky for applications
such as early warning systems for
natural disasters where more certainty
is needed.
Performance Security
Control risks
Economic
risks
Social risk Ethical Risks

17. CONCLUSION
• Artificial intelligence helps a lot to make environmental sustainability .AI has
the potential to accelerate global efforts to protect the environment and
conserve resources by detecting energy emission reductions, CO2 removal,
helping develop greener transportation networks, monitoring deforestation,
Ocean Health ,Smart agriculture and predicting extreme weather conditions.