Sustainability and the technologies enabling the transition

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Creating a sustainable future demands significant technological innovation to decarbonize society, restore biodiversity and ecosystem health, foster thriving oceans for sustenance and economic growth, remove atmospheric carbon, transition to sustainable agriculture, and advance eco-friendly cities that align with our vision for a better future. Generative AI has achieved much in recent years and now surpasses human performance on many language-based tasks. The true opportunity is much larger however, Generative AI powered by foundation models can be the building block that empowers scientists, engineers, and decision makers to create a more sustainable future reversing elevated carbon levels, collapsing biospheres, and inhospitable weather events.

At IBM’s flagship conference, Think 2023, we unveiled watsonx, an innovative platform encompassing a studio, data store, and governance toolkit, aimed at harnessing the power of foundation models and generative AI. The potential of these type of models lies with the fact that they are trained on massive volumes of raw data to learn the patterns and structures of language, and then fine-tuned on specific tasks or domains to adapt its generated output to more specific contexts or objectives. Foundation models are powerful, versatile, and can be used to quickly perform tasks with minimal or no training or supervision.

At IBM, our vision for foundation AI far exceeds language. Our vision is a foundation model for language, geospatial imagery, code, manufacturing, chemistry, and many other modalities. Watsonx is a next-generation AI platform that puts the power of AI in the hands of scientists, engineers, builders, and decision makers everywhere. Eliminating barriers around data curation, model training, tuning, validation, and deployment, Watsonx transforms people from AI users into AI creators.

Humanity’s greatest challenge is climate change. Generative AI can revolutionize scientific discovery, accelerate the creation of new innovation, and deepen our understanding of the earth and our ability to thrive in a holistic manner.

Earlier this year IBM and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center announced a collaboration to use IBM’s AI technology to discover new insights in NASA’s massive trove of Earth and geospatial science data. The joint work would apply AI foundation model technology to NASA’s Earth-observing satellite data for the first time.

The ability to deepen understanding of land surface processes is but the first step to empowering many industries with generative AI.

• Sustainable agriculture: Farmers have long possessed an intrinsic bond with their land, coupled with a profound comprehension of its unique attributes and the growth performance of crops across each field. As farms evolve in size and intricacy, generative AI emerges as a crucial tool to inform decision-making processes. By assimilating information on soil health, carbon stock, moisture levels, nutrient levels, evapotranspiration, crop stage, potential yield, harvest requirements, and market conditions, generative AI models empower stakeholders to amalgamate, analyse, and extract insights from diverse data sources. This enables the identification of optimal crop management strategies, fostering the pursuit of truly sustainable agriculture. As an example, IBM are working with Texas A&M to enhance the sustainability of agriculture for small-holding farmers by combining sensors, satellite, simulation, and AI to guide decision making, enhance productivity, and reduce environmental impacts.
• Decarbonisation of shipping industry: Ship transport accounts for over 90% of global trade in goods and raw materials, making the efficiency and speed of large container ships critical to the value chains and production processes of countries worldwide. However, the environmental impacts of shipping, including emissions, fuel efficiency, noise pollution, and habitat disruption, are becoming increasingly intolerable. To address these concerns, IBM Research are working with a consortium of European partners to enable Digital Twin for Green Shipping (DT4GS). By leveraging an interoperable dataspace that captures the interconnections among various ship components, DT4GS introduces a scalable AI library designed to tackle diverse facets of shipping, encompassing maintenance, repairs, route selection, navigation, and port arrivals.
• Healthy oceans: The ocean, covering 71% of Earth’s surface, is the largest and most critical ecosystem, offering vital resources and supporting numerous livelihoods. It sustains 80% of life on the planet, provides essential oxygen and acts as a significant carbon sink, mitigating global warming and absorbing 90% of the extra heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions. Recently, IBM and The Reef Company, have joined forces signing a joint initiative agreement aimed at bolstering their ocean conservation endeavours. The Reef Company is on a mission to build 2.500 engineered reefs, covering an average area of 50Km2 each, with a total investment of USD 500 Billion. The primary objective of this grand project is to restore and revitalize the marine ecosystem, sustaining the invaluable ecosystem of services nature offers, including carbon capture. Together with IBM’s support, the aim is leveraging data from the ocean and technology, and taking the project to the next level.  This incorporates cutting-edge ocean sensors to measure crucial variables like temperature, dissolved oxygen, and Chlorophyll-a. These measurements are integrated with 4D ocean model simulation data and remotely sensed observations of the ocean surface, enabling the creation of a comprehensive and highly detailed representation of the ocean at both spatial and temporal levels.

For more on this and many more topics, join us in Brussels on June 20^th at IBM TechConnect and IBM Together for Change, where we will be delivering the opening keynote.