Accelerating Canada’s Sustainability Journey

By ibmblogsOctober 21, 2022

Mid adult woman teaching daughter to charge electric car at charging station

Achieving climate resilience is possible

On June 29, 2021, the temperature in Lytton, British Columbia hit a scorching 49.6°C, the highest reading ever recorded in Canada. The next day, wildfire destroyed most of the village – just one of the climate disasters linked to the Western North America heat wave of 2021.

Climate change is the single greatest challenge of our time. With Canada’s climate warming twice as fast as the global average, catastrophic events such heat waves, wildfires and floods are costing billions and putting communities and people at risk.

The steps needed to reduce climate risk require transition and adaptation plans which are already well underway. The federal government has pledged to reduce GHG emissions by 40-45% by 2030 and is investing in climate solutions that will help Canada realize a low-carbon future by 2050.

Public sector organizations are setting climate targets and planning for the capabilities, skills, tools, and dedicated environments needed to build solutions that will help mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Whether improving ESG governance, advancing food safety, reducing plastic waste, understanding weather patterns, or developing tools for sustainable agriculture, IBM aspires to be a catalyst to make a positive, lasting impact – to help create a resilient, sustainable future for Canada and the world.

Key components of the sustainability journey

To make the world work better, we must first determine what steps are needed to effect real change.

To yield the best results, we rely on several components that build upon one another from start to finish:

Identifying and developing a data strategy that will act as a roadmap to drive decisions and actions
Building a collaborative partner ecosystem to accelerate sustainability initiatives
Understanding climate data to inform management planning decisions, using platforms such as the Environmental Intelligence Suite
Leveraging cloud and open source technology and implementing workable solutions

Start with the right data strategy

The first step on the sustainability journey is to identify the right data strategy. What climate data is needed to define the roadmap that will help clients realize the highest priority climate opportunities and use cases?

Getting to the right climate-related data is often hindered by manual processes and disparate or duplicate data sources. Centralized access to data, processes, and tools ensures that everyone needing climate-related data have access to the same single source of truth.

The first step is to assess the current data landscape to identify the methods and effort required to address data gaps for climate initiatives. Recently, our team worked with a Canadian bank to understand their climate data challenges and opportunities, and to define an execution approach for their climate data strategy. Among the findings? A lack of automated processes that would help access, process, and store data for climate-related initiatives, along with data and capability gaps in evaluating climate risk.

We helped the bank create a three-year climate data roadmap that defined the requirements that would address bank’s climate objectives and align with its target enterprise data platform, refine use cases and data requirements, and set up a climate transformation roadmap to enable climate initiatives.

As governments pursue sustainability initiatives that are focused on mitigating climate risks, shifting to a clean economy, and addressing social, diversity and inclusion priorities, they require a foundational strategy in place to access and leverage insights from climate, social and economic data that allows them to maintain and scale these initiatives.

Create a partner ecosystem

Sustainability problems are fundamentally “tragedy of the commons” problems, which is why a collaborative partner ecosystem is not just helpful, but is necessary to make sustainable change possible. Uniting forward-thinking governments and organizations with strategic partners can effectively accelerate sustainability efforts by enabling the exchange of data across value chains, industry silos and technology solutions. Let’s look at two examples:

Recognizing the urgency of the world’s plastic waste problem, governments, NGOs and a group of major players in the plastics value chain joined forces to form the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. Their goal? To develop projects designed to reduce plastic waste and lessen the damage that’s already been done.

In late 2020, the Alliance decided a global data hub was needed to provide a secure data platform for stakeholders to convene, collaborate and innovate, with built-in analytics to strengthen the value of the data to stakeholders.

The result of that effort was the Plastic Recovery Insight and Steering Model (PRISM). Co-created with IBM Consulting using the IBM Garage delivery methodology, PRISM supplies the data and tools needed to analyze and prioritize project opportunities anywhere in the world. And because PRISM runs on IBM Cloud, it can easily scale as the volume of data and users grows worldwide.

The platform serves as a single source of consistent, actionable data that is helping inform how NGOs, value chain participants, communities, regulators, and other organizations improve waste management decisions and programs. Using PRISM, the Alliance has already been able to model plastic leakage and waste processing capacity for many cities in developing countries like India and Indonesia.

Another example of ecosystem collaboration relates to food safety and accountability.

Through open and collaborative data platforms, sustainable approaches to food safety can be achieved. Data-driven food traceability helps government agencies and suppliers identify the source of a foodborne disease outbreak, improve recall efforts, and uncover why the problem occurred.

Industry efforts have been the steppingstone to creating a worldwide ecosystem that contributes to a safer, more sustainable food system for all. Take IBM Food Trust, a collaborative ecosystem of growers, producers, suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and others who are enhancing visibility, traceability and accountability across the food chain by ensuring freshness, safety and quality while reducing food waste and improving supply chain efficiencies.

Implement the technology that can change the world

The Government of Canada is investing $134.4 million in a Food Policy that provides a roadmap to a healthier, more sustainable food system. A partner like IBM Consulting can help clients think through the many different components required to build an open ecosystem platform that connects upstream and downstream data and processes to make such initiatives possible.

How are emerging technologies in AI, IoT, and big data being used to help improve food production in a world of climate change and population? For farmers, access to the right information is crucial in making the best decisions about their land management, fertilizer and pesticide use in a way that maximizes crop yields and minimizes the impact on the environment.

Water quality is one indicator that has steadily worsened over the last several decades, largely driven by fertilizer and pesticide run-off. Norway-based Yara, one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers, partnered with IBM to build the world’s leading digital farming platform.

The platform consolidates climate change scenarios, soil nutrient data, weather company data, advanced analytics, and AI decision models to provide farmers with real-time insights that alerts them to the times when chemicals are most needed and helps them avoid situations (such as before a storm) where they may end up as run-off.

Yara is taking a major step towards transforming the global food system by leveraging technology and inviting all food value chain players to join this collaborative movement to help feed the world more efficiently and sustainably.

Be a catalyst for change

Public sector organizations in Canada and around the world are addressing sustainability challenges with digital and data solutions, AI, hybrid cloud, and ecosystem partnerships.

The IBM Sustainability Consulting Services team helps clients integrate sustainable practices across all of their economic activities. Whether we assist with operational efficiencies, emission reduction, or sustainability metrics tracking – and much more – our practitioners are industry and sustainability technologists who are leveraging IBM’s exponential technologies to help both public and private sector organizations reach their sustainability goals.

As a leader in sustainability research and technology for over 50 years, IBM can act as both strategic and technology partner to accelerate our clients’ sustainability journey from data strategy to technology implementation.

It’s not just about the data or the technology. It’s about being a driving catalyst for changing the world for the better, one community at a time.