As global biodiversity continues to decline steeply, the health and functioning of crucial ecosystems like forests, the ocean, rivers and wetlands will be affected. Coupled with climate change impacts which are evident in warnings from scientists and the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events worldwide; this is going to be disastrous for the ecological balance of the planet and for our survival. Earth Overshoot Day is a stark reminder of the urgent actions individuals, countries and the global community must take to protect forests, oceans, wildlife and freshwater resources and help achieve resilience and sustainable development for all.
We have a critical window of opportunity between now and to put in place commitments and actions to reverse the trend of nature loss by and help ensure the health and well-being of people and our planet. Every day new evidence of our unsustainable impact on the environment is emerging. This has happened in less than a generation. A blink of the eye, compared to the hundreds of millions of years some of these species have lived on our planet.
All indicators point toward our planet being on the brink. Why does this matter? It matters because we will not build a stable, prosperous and equitable future on a depleted planet. It is time to focus on the solutions which we know exist or have the potential to be developed and this is where technology, along with behavioural change, can help us reboot the health of our nature and planet. Earlier this year, WWF in Australia, Fiji and New Zealand joined forces to stamp out illegal fishing and slave labour in the tuna fishing industry using blockchain technology.
On land as well, remote sensing plays an important role in planning, monitoring, and evaluating impact on the ground. It has enabled WWF to monitor the developments of extractive industries in socially and ecologically-sensitive areas, including World Heritage sites. WRI World Research Institute has developed Global Forest Watch GFW , an online forest monitoring and alert system that uses crowdsourcing, to allow anyone to create custom maps, analyse forest trends, subscribe to alerts, or download data for their local area or the entire world.
They search for armed poachers who spill across the border from Tanzania to hunt for bush meat and ivory. For years the number of poachers overwhelmed the relatively small cadre of rangers.
Technology is now helping to turn the tide. Thermal imaging video cameras enable rangers to catch poachers at record rates and deter many more from even making the attempt. Beyond direct interventions to stop poaching, WWF also uses technology to go after wildlife traffickers.
It is hard to think of technology and nature together but even advances like Artificial Intelligence AI that could not be further removed from the natural world are helping conservation efforts. In China, WWF and tech giant Intel are harnessing the power of AI to help protect wild tigers and their habitats, while also protecting countless other species as a result while helping carbon storage, vital watersheds and communities in the area. The possibilities for technology partnerships to reboot nature are endless.
Our challenge now is to scale this work beyond a few test sites and into all of the places we are working to protect the planet. To make them work reliably, they demand an overproduction of energy. They're prone to attack, and they tend to rely on pollution-emitting energy sources. Smart grids are already being rolled out in testbeds in the US and internationally. The concept isn't so much a single technology as the deployment of numerous energy, distribution, networking, automation, and sensing technologies to design a new grid for the 21st century.
Smart grids will enable local production of energy down to the household level, which can be fed back into the grid upstream. Sensing technology and more accurate prediction models will fine-tune energy production to avoid overproduction, and better battery technology see 7 on this list will enable storage of renewably sourced energy. The concept even reaches beyond the light socket. As appliances get smarter, the grid may start to automatically signal them to shut off to conserve power.
All of this could add up to a huge change in how our power infrastructure functions. There's too much carbon dioxide in the air, and it's warming our planet. What if we could capture and sequester it? That's the premise of Carbon Capture and Storage CCS , an emerging class of technologies that are primed to play an important role in the health of our planet in the decades ahead. The carbon is transported by pipeline and stored in rock formations far below ground.
In , the world's first CO2 capture plant went live in Switzerland. Startups in the US and Canada have developed carbon capture plants of their own. At scale, the technology could help reverse one of the most alarming environmental trends of our time. Our sun is powered by the fusion of hydrogen nuclei, forming helium.
For decades, scientists have been working on harnessing the same process to create sustainable terrestrial power. The effort is extremely compelling from an ecological standpoint because it represents a zero-carbon emissions form of energy. Unlike nuclear fission, the process that powers current nuclear plants, fusion does not result in the production of long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. The problem is heat. To generate net positive energy when two particles fuse, the reaction has to take place at millions of degrees celsius, and that means whatever vessel you're using to do the fusing will, well, melt.
The answer is to suspend the reaction in a floating plasma so the extreme heat doesn't touch the chamber, a process researchers believe can be achieved using high-powered magnets. The typical timeline offered for fusion power is 30 years, but a team at MIT working with a new class of magnets believes it can get fusion power into the grid in just 15 years, which would be a huge boon in the fight to slow the planet's warming trend.
Sure, it may doom us all via any number of sci-fi premises nuclear annihilation, strategic species eradication, the rise of the robots but artificial intelligence also might be our best bet computing ourselves out of the grave state we find ourselves in. Microsoft's AI for Earth program is one effort underway to harness the potential of AI for the good of the planet. The program has given more than research grants to teams applying AI technologies to planetary health in one of four areas: biodiversity, climate, water, and agriculture.
Primitive AI and machine learning algorithms are currently analyzing icy surfaces to measure changes over time, helping researchers plant new forests with precise layouts to maximize carbon sequestration, and enabling warning systems to help stem destructive algae blooms. AI is having an impact on agricultural practices and will soon transform how farming is done in industrialized nations, reducing our reliance on pesticides and drastically lowering water consumption.
AI will make autonomous vehicles more navigate more efficiently, lowering air pollution. AI is being deployed by material scientists to develop biodegradable replacements to plastics and develop strategies to clean our oceans, which receive some eight million metric tons of plastics annually.
Fundamentally, AI will be the bedrock of our future efforts to undo the damage already done to the planet while figuring out scalable solutions to sustaining our species' energy, food, and water needs.
Internet Archive celebrates 25 years, seeks funds amid new legal challenges. Unsupervised AI arrives for quality inspection. Freshworks expands into IT operations management running its familiar playbook. AI is learning to talk back. How that's changing the customer and employee experience. Xero posts half-year net loss as investment in product development grows. How Meta could muck up the metaverse.
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The city has recently updated its real estate maps using remotely sensed data. Some hotels had been masquerading as studio apartments and were billed accordingly. While remote sensing has not replaced the need for metering, the new data have at least allowed the city to price water more accurately. The technologies raise some privacy concerns, for instance, that could lead polluters to cloak or hide their polluting activities, further inhibiting pollution monitoring and cleanup.
Several legal cases concerning constitutional protections against warrantless searches have been motivated by the use of aerial photography for monitoring environmental compliance, and in more recent cases polluters had attempted to shield their actions from surveillance.
Most recently, Midwest farming conglomerates have expressed concern about the public availability of aerial imagery if it is detailed enough to disclose farming practices. Such concerns could lead to curbs on the use of remote sensing for pollution monitoring and regulatory enforcement. The trade-off between benefits and costs of new developments in biotechnology has made headlines in the case of genetically modified food supplies. Similar concerns surround the technology of bioremediation.
Naturally occurring microorganisms have long been used to break down human, agricultural, industrial, and municipal organic wastes. Now, genetically engineered organisms are being used to treat not only industrial effluent, but also wastewater, contaminated soil, and petroleum spills. Bioremediation treats about percent of all toxic chemicals and other hazardous waste; has successfully treated oil, gasoline, toluene, naphthalene, pentachlorophenol a fungicide and wood preservative , and agricultural waste; and is being used at more than 30 munitions test areas across the United States.
Bioremediation can be a particularly cost-effective approach. Most of the costs of traditional cleanup technologies come in removing and disposing of contaminated soil, water, or other materials. Bioremediation requires only delivering the bacteria to the site, not excavating or otherwise disturbing it, thus reducing post-cleanup costs.
These benefits must be balanced against what some critics view as potentially large drawbacks. One concern is that bioremediation may largely immobilize rather than fully remediate contamination. Another is that instead of reverting to its original state, the site will be transformed in some unexpected way.
A third concern is that the potential risks of adding genetically altered organisms to the environment, or even redistributing naturally occurring ones, may not be fully understood.
The revolution in information technology promises economic changes almost as great as those of the industrial revolution itself. Digital data storage, manipulation, and communication may not appear to have environmental implications, but some examples suggest otherwise. High-speed, high-bandwidth connectivity between our homes and offices may allow us to telecommute; it may also worsen sprawl around metropolitan areas if workers find it increasingly practical to live farther from their work.
Packaging of e-commerce goods for shipping may be more materials- and energy-intensive than store-bought goods. Some controversial studies have even suggested that growth in demand for electricity, driven by new kinds of customers such as computer server warehouses, may have helped overload the electrical grid in northern California last summer. The net effect of new information technologies on energy consumption, land use, and travel has yet to be carefully studied.
From another perspective, as a tool for research and communication about the environment, the Internet appears to hold much promise. For research, it offers online bibliographic search engines, data archives and retrieval systems, rapid exchange of research results with distant colleagues, and software for scientific modeling of complex environmental processes.
For example, if automobile prices reflected all the environmental costs of tailpipe emissions, auto makers would have stronger incentives to use new pollution control technologies in new car models. For instance, tradable pollution permits-such as for sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants-have created financial incentives for electricity generators to adopt cleaner production processes. These market-based approaches can be more cost-effective than traditional emissions limits or technology standards, because firms that can reduce emissions most cheaply cut them more than they otherwise would-and then sell their excess permits to firms that cannot.
At the same time, the market-based approaches induce innovations by putting a price on emissions and reductions. The use of such incentive-based approaches is growing not only here, but abroad. International policy discussions on global climate change include taxes on carbon emissions and the use of marketable permits. Similar approaches to getting prices right in managing water quality and waste, as in our examples above, are likely to discourage environmentally harmful uses of these resources and further encourage use of new technologies in managing them.
Information technologies in particular will help expand the scope and effectiveness of incentive-based approaches, for at least four reasons.
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