Artificial intelligence has potential to reshape environmental protection – NGO

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to help solve pressing environmental challenges needs to be better understood and exploited, panellists agreed at a debate on AI and the environment organised by Microsoft in Berlin. “AI is going to change the way environmental organisations work,” said Marco Vollmar of WWF Germany. Using machine learning and big data processing capacities make these organisations’ work much more cost efficient and enable them to understand and monitor things like animal migration, forest management, or fishing a lot better, Vollmar said. He urged greater political and financial support for AI-based environmental protection projects, even though the difficulties environmentalists encounter are often political rather than technological in nature. “Digitalisation and AI bring change and disruption to businesses and to society, and environmental protection cannot stay untouched by that,” he added. In a survey commissioned by Microsoft, 50 percent of respondents said they were confident that AI could help manage environmental challenges, the company said. “There need to be more concrete trial projects, for example about resource use and autonomous driving or pesticide use in agriculture,” Green Party politician Anna Christmann said at the panel debate. Policymakers in Germany had to become less reluctant to cooperate with digital companies and heed the example of France, which recently made environmental protection a key aim of its AI strategy. “However, it’s also important to look at the impact digital technology itself has on the environment,” Christmann pointed out. Power consumption and carbon emissions of blockchain technologies and other resource-intensive effects of a rapidly growing digital world should be one of the first application areas for AI to support environmental protection, she said.

Find a press release by Microsoft on AI and the environment in German here and in English here.

Find background in the CLEW dossier The digitalisation of the Energiewende.