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IBM turns to AI to predict and mitigate climate risk

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IBM turns to AI to predict and mitigate climate risk

Extreme weather is already affecting supply chains around the planet

IBM has launched a new AI-based tool to help companies assess and mitigate climate risks and their carbon footprint.

Dubbed the Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS), the SaaS tool brings together artificial intelligence, IBM weather data, climate risk analytics and carbon accounting capabilities. IBM says companies can use these features to 'prepare for and respond to weather and climate risks that may disrupt business, more easily assess their own impact on the planet, and reduce the complexity of regulatory compliance and reporting.'

Extreme and unseasonal weather is already affecting supply chains worldwide, notably in contributing to the ongoing chip shortage; a lower-than-normal number of storms around Taiwan has caused a water shortage, and freezing weather shut down power in Texas earlier this year.

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2021 cited extreme weather, climate action failure and human-led environmental damage as the top three most likely risks for businesses over the next ten years. However, IBM argues, getting hold of actionable environmental insights is difficult today.

The company's new suite of tools is designed to help firms assess climate risks and more effectively use their underlying processes to meet their climate goals. It achieves this by helping customers:

Monitor for disruptive environmental conditions, and send alerts when detected;
Predict potential impacts of climate change and weather across the business;
Gain insights into potential disruptions and prioritise mitigation and response efforts;
Measure and report on environmental initiatives.

The aim is to improve efficiency when it comes to curating and analysing climate data, using APIs, dashboards, maps and alerts.

IBM gives examples of how customers could use the insights from the tool:

'The suite could be used to help retailers prepare for severe weather-related shipping and inventory disruptions, or factor environmental risks into future warehouse locations; energy and utility companies to determine where to trim vegetation around power lines or which of their critical assets may soon be at greater risk from wildfires due to climate change. Or the suite could be used to help supermarkets get a clearer picture of how refrigeration systems are contributing to their overall greenhouse gas emissions and prioritise locations for improvement.'

Not just IBM

IBM joins a growing list of companies using their technology to fight climate change. Google also released its own sets of tools this week for customers to monitor emissions associated with Google Cloud Platform (the company is also working with Salesforce so these figures can be exported to the Salesforce Sustainability Cloud), and Microsoft rebranded its Sustainability Calculator - which does the same thing, for Azure customers - as the Emissions Impact Dashboard.

Google will now tell customers about the carbon footprint of idle or abandoned projects that are still running on its servers. Some clients will also be able to use the Google Earth Engine to achieve similar outcomes to IBM's EIS: to 'track, monitor and predict changes in the Earth's surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities', using maps, AI and BigQuery.

A media director we talked to said that a large part of the push towards helping companies track emissions comes down to money - unsurprisingly. Firms are under increasing pressure from asset managers to demonstrate compliance with the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) - and as some of these asset managers hold trillions of pounds in assets, compliance will not be voluntary for long.

"This means firms are under pressure to show not just their own carbon footprint in a financial audit, but the emissions of their supply chain, and the emissions from the usage of their product/services use. For enterprises, this means the emissions of their cloud computing suppliers are going to start affecting their share price and their ability to raise finance through corporate bonds. You can expect the cloud suppliers to compete vigorously on this topic, and to go into overdrive to reduce their power consumption or green it.

"Firms that do not comply are going to find themselves uninvestible as the financial behemoth investors declare, like Peter Jones on Dragon's Den, 'I'm out'. They will have their shares downgraded as markets price in climate and regulatory financial risk. In practice, that means a company's shares price will go down if financial markets perceive that they are at risk of losing value from increasing regulation, or at risk of losing trade as their customers shift to clean suppliers: TCFD will force their customers to declare their emissions alongside their own. Basically there's no hiding. Its an actual, honest-to-goodness revolution."

The use of AI in climate change, and more, will be discussed at Computing 's Tech Impact Conference, coming in 2022.

IBM turns to AI to predict and mitigate climate risk

Extreme weather is already affecting supply chains around the planet

Not just IBM

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