The Amazon Fires: Artificial Intelligence to Help
The Tragic Beginning…
Since August 15, more than 9,500 new forest fires have started across Brazil, primarily in the Amazon basin. For a fact, the Amazon rainforest covers 2.1 million square miles, and it provides 20 percent of the oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere. Due to the recent fires, the Amazon shrunk by 519 square miles (1,345 square kilometers). That’s more than twice the area of Tokyo. Additionally, the total deforested area in July was up 39 percent, and about three football fields’ worth of Amazonian trees fell every minute, which is totally shocking.
The reasons vary; some blame the President of Brazil, air Bolsonaro, saying his policies have only threatened the forest more, while others blame farmers for deforestation and raising more than 200,000 cattle around that area. No matter what were the reasons, it is us, the people, who mainly caused it, and now, environmentalists are predicting that instead of Oxygen, the Amazon will be producing Carbon Dioxide.
Artificial Intelligence Coming to Rescue
Technology was used for basic, carried-out operations, to lessen activities that could have taken years to be solved. Now, it is evident that Technology is in every part of our lives, and it has been used in many fields for many useful ways. On July 2019, major AI and Machine Learning advocates published a paper called “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning.” The paper, which was discussed at a workshop during a major AI conference in June, was a “call to arms” to bring researchers together. The authors of the paper — which include DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio, and Google Brain co-founder Andrew Ng — say that AI could be “invaluable” in mitigating and preventing the worse effects of climate change, but note that it is not a “silver bullet” and that political action is desperately needed, too.
“Technology alone is not enough. Technologies that would reduce climate change have been available for years, but have largely not been adopted at scale by society. While we hope that ML will be useful in reducing the costs associated with climate action, humanity also must decide to act.”
Andrew Ng -Google Brain co-founder
The paper offers up to13 areas where machine learning can be deployed, including energy production, CO2 removal, education, solar geoengineering, and finance.
It was categorized by the time-frame of their potential impact, and whether or not the technology involved is developed enough to reap certain rewards.
But, has developers actually began deploying AI for climate change?
A project by Claire Monteleoni, one of the speakers at the Climate Change workshop, worked on uses machine learning algorithms to combine the predictions of the approximately 30 climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Better predictions can help officials make informed climate policy, allow governments to prepare for change, and potentially uncover areas that could reverse some effects of climate change.
Another project is Carbon Tracker, which is an independent financial think-tank working toward the UN goal of preventing new coal plants from being built by 2020. By monitoring coal plant emissions with satellite imagery, Carbon Tracker can use the data it gathers to convince the finance industry that carbon plants aren’t profitable.
A grant from Google is expanding the nonprofit’s satellite imagery efforts to include gas-powered plants’ emissions and get a better sense of where air pollution is coming from. While there are continuous monitoring systems near power plants that can measure CO2 emissions more directly, they do not have a global reach.
Also, Google has started estimating greenhouse-gas emissions for individual cities, part of what it recently described as an ambitious new plan to deploy its hoard of geographic information on the side of climate-concerned local leaders.
The first step toward taking climate action is creating an emissions inventory. Understanding your current situation at the city scale, and understanding what you can do to it — that’s an information problem, and that’s a good place for Google to sit.
Saleem Van Groenou, a program manager at Google Earth
So far, the company has only released estimates for five cities, including Pittsburgh, Buenos Aires, and Mountain View, California. It plans to expand the program gradually to cover municipalities worldwide, but has declined to provide more specific plans. As part of this initiative, Google says it will also release its proprietary estimates of a city’s annual driving, biking, and transit ridership, generated from information collected by its popular mapping apps, Google Maps and Waze. The company has never released this kind of aggregate transportation data to the public before, and it says it may share even more specific types of data with individual local governments.
In Ethiopia, The Office of University Industry Linkage and Technology Transfer and Center for Information Technology and Scientific Computing, AAiT in partnership with Wolaita Sodo University will be organizing the first International Conference titled ‘AI in Ethiopia’. From OCT 21st to 23rd, 2019, the Ethiopians in AI initiative will also be launched with an aim to coordinate the activities of all experts working in AI in Ethiopia.
In Conclusion
Climate change has been a problem ever since, and no one can deny that. Unfortunately, the Amazons widespread fire is just an example of how neglected, uncared, and shallow people are.
Artificial Intelligence as a technology can help out reducing the byproducts and help us move and grow up without affecting our mother nature.
Thanks for reading and do a good cardio to your hands by pressing the clap button. ^_^
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