Commentary: Every Day is Earth Day With Next-Gen Tech

Artificial intelligence at your fingertips. Augmented reality. Autonomous vehicles. Nanotechnology. Sensor-driven health care and public services. More computing power on your phone than in the supercomputers of a few decades ago. The impact and pace of change are mind-boggling.

Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, believes we are at the beginning of a new revolution that will fundamentally change how people and governments interact with each other — and with our planet: “... It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human,” Schwab says. “The resulting shifts and disruptions mean that we live in a time of great promise and great peril. The world has the potential to connect billions more people to digital networks, dramatically improve the efficiency of organizations and even manage assets in ways that can help regenerate the natural environment, potentially undoing the damage of previous industrial revolutions.”

One day after Earth Day, how can we put the promise of technology into action? What damage needs undoing? What efforts will have the most impact?

DATA-DRIVEN SUSTAINABILITY

Analytics can assist across the life cycle of sustainability programs, from capturing data to deriving insights on what has happened (descriptive analytics) and why (diagnostic analytics), to forecasting what will happen (predictive analytics) and recommending how to make desirable outcomes more likely (prescriptive analytics).

Largely, we are still in the early life stage of defining data and building models to understand what is happening (descriptive analytics). This task usually falls to governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which are challenged to even access the data necessary to set goals and measure progress. Partnering with local government and businesses can help.
An example of this is the UN Global Pulse Initiative, which uses Big Data to establish “17 Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) to transform our world. The UN and its 193 member countries are working to establish measures as well as the ability to collect and track reliable data for each of the SDGs.

POWERING THE PLANET’S FUTURE

Of course, governments and NGOs rely on advances from the private sector. Microsoft has committed $50 million to its AI for Earth program and is seeing results from new AI and cloud technologies, from a smart grid in Norway that responds in real time to increased demand from electric vehicles, to smart buildings in Singapore that improve energy efficiency. In the U.S. alone, buildings are responsible for about 40 percent of total energy consumption. That means an efficiency improvement in buildings of even 15 percent would translate into a 6 percent reduction in energy consumption.

By 2050, there will likely be more than 9 billion people on Earth, and feeding them will be one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. The amount of arable land on the planet has decreased by about one-third in the past 40 years. 

Google is helping address this challenge through Big Data for customers like AgroTools, a smart agriculture company in Brazil that has compiled the world’s largest repository of geospatial data. Using Google Cloud Platform and BiqQuery, AgroTools provides insights for the entire tropical agribusiness supply chain, from government and financial services to equipment manufacturers and food producers, helping ensure sustainable practices.

Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform is helping fight climate change as well. A machine learning pilot in India saw 30 percent higher average in yield per hectare. Farmers received text messages on sowing advisories, such as the sowing date, land preparation and soil test-based fertilizer application.

In another project, The Yield, powered by Azure, machine learning applications provide on-farm sensors and intelligent digital solutions to help farmers know when to plant, irrigate, feed, protect and harvest their crops.

An IoT tool for irrigation called SCADAFarm enabled a New Zealand farm to remotely monitor, manage and analyze water usage, which resulted in a 30 percent decrease in water consumption and a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency on the area of operation.

Here in California, local government IoT projects show potential. The city of Santa Cruz is testing real-time water metering, and Orange County is bullish on microtransit to help solve gaps in current public transportation ridership. 

What do all these remarkable technology advances have in common? At their core is data. I see tremendous potential in Big Data, AI, machine learning, gamification, AR, and next-gen tech such as nanotech and neurotechnology helping governments, NGOs, private sector and citizens intervene on our planet’s behalf. These tools can help us better understand the behavior change that is needed for more sustainable practices, and the impact we are making.

These are the tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — and they are here today. Are we ready to harness them to make real change in how humans interact with our environment? Continuing the Earth Day mission, I hope you’ll join me and thousands of other citizens in setting specific plans in motion to preserve our planet.

Davood Ghods is vice president of Government Solutions for Direct Technology. He leverages his 30 years of experience serving the state of California, most recently as chief of the California Office of Technology Services (OTech), to fuel digital transformations in public organizations.