Can AI help tackle climate change

In the last decade, artificial intelligence has been used in more and more areas of life. With the human-like chatbot "ChatGPT" the AI discussion has now taken on a new dimension. However, AIs such as Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant have been simplifying many people's lives for a long time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can assist users in various everyday tasks, including driver assistance systems and smart homes. Additionally, AIs can also be beneficial in scientific fields, such as climate change research.

How can AI help tackle climate change?

While the effects of climate change are often clearly visible physically, analyzing and understanding all events is often a complex and time-consuming process. AIs can help to better understand these changes in climate, which will help make more accurate forecasts. Governments and companies can use climate modeling and climate forecasts to better prepare for the coming challenges or to counteract them at an early stage.

Relevant areas of application for this can be, for example, reactions to environmental problems such as marine pollution or catastrophes such as droughts or forest fires. Other important aspects in which artificial intelligence can play a major role are renewable energies and energy efficiency.

Also on the basis of climate models and weather forecasts, it is becoming much easier to monitor both weather conditions and power generation capacities. This helps to optimize the operation of solar or wind systems. In the field of energy efficiency, AIs follow a similar principle. They analyze various data such as humidity, temperature, or usage times and can thus optimize the heating, cooling, or lighting of buildings.

Challenges until AIs can really be helpful

As valuable as the support provided by artificial intelligence may appear, there are still prerequisites and challenges. One of the biggest challenges is the amount of data that an AI needs to deliver really optimal results. Reliable data is not always available everywhere. Climate modeling can therefore be less precise, especially in more remote areas.

Another problem is that AI always needs a sufficient power supply to function. In order to compensate for this energy expenditure, the AI ​​systems must therefore work as energy-efficiently as possible. Human-AI collaboration can also be an obstacle. Anyone who wants to work with artificial intelligence must also be able to use the available tools. It is therefore particularly important that users know how to feed the AIs with data and how to use the results to make their workflows as efficient as possible.

Use of AIs in the future

Probably the biggest problems currently associated with working with AIs are a lack of experience and comparatively little trust in them. With the growth of AIs in all areas of life, trust in non-human work will also increase in the future, so that AIs can be used more purposefully and profitably in terms of climate protection.