Axios House at COP28: Accelerating Environmental Science Through AI
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Attendees enjoyed lunch with a view during the discussion. Credit: Arthur Abraham/Hyku D Photography for Axios
An Axios House Expert Voices Roundtable Discussion at COP28 in Dubai
On Tuesday, December 5, Axios House hosted an Expert Voices roundtable discussion event as part of our week of programming at COP28 in Dubai. The discussion convened experts in climate tech and sustainable development for a conversation exploring the potential applications, use cases and impacts of AI in environmental science and climate analysis. Axios senior climate reporter Andrew Freedman and 1 big thing host/editor Niala Boodhoo led the conversation.
What they're saying: Attendees emphasized the growing importance of AI technology in climate science and how it's being used to analyze environmental data with a better understanding of how and where to accelerate climate action. They also noted the need to understand the risks of AI to ensure high quality and accurate data.
- Antoine Halff, Kayrros chief analyst & co-founder: "AI is really fundamental, and data enabled by AI and data inquiry [are] fundamental to climate action. You cannot really identify opportunities, measure and assess the efficiency of policies without having the capacity to measure the impact, measure the risks, and that's where AI comes in."
- Robbie Schingler, Planet Labs PBC co-founder & chief strategy officer: "It also can combine different data sources together in order to then understand something that can't be seen with our eyes or ourselves in a much more efficient way. One example is how much carbon is stored in a tree … We've trained a model that is over 80% accurate for every tree on the planet."
- Paige Morse, Aspen Technology sustainability advisor: "With AI it's always about the quality of the data, that's a risk always, and you need to be sure that whatever analysis you do you're starting with a good basis. So that remains, not on the human bias side, but more on the data quality side which I think is important."
- Hendrik F. Hamann, IBM Research chief scientific officer for climate and sustainability: "AI is really a way to accelerate. What do we accelerate? We accelerate the scaling of solutions, which we have already, it's really scaling for climate … it will accelerate the discovery of new solutions. So when I think about why AI is so important, it's about scale, discovery, acceleration."
Thank you to IBM for sponsoring this event.
