Insights
5 July 2019

How humans and AI together can help fix Planet Earth

By Cervest

How humans and AI together can help fix Planet Earth

Climate crisis. Mass Extinction. Apocalypse. Catastrophe. Breakdown The language we now use around climate change has escalated significantly in 2019, reflecting the seriousness of the challenge humanity now faces.

Human activity is causing the Sixth Mass Extinction and the headlines are shocking. A biological annihilation of wildlife is threatening to wipe out one million species within decades. Meanwhile, soils are degrading, reducing the productivity of 23% of the Earth’s land surface – and already affecting the food supplies we rely on. More than 12m hectares of forest were destroyed just last year. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is higher than it has been at any other time during the last 3m years. And global heating could cause the oceans to rise a staggering 6.5 feet by 2100 – swamping territory the size of Western Europe and potentially making 187m people homeless.

While we cannot claim to have evaluated the science in detail here, the trend is very clear – and it’s almost overwhelming. However, business leaders, governments and farmers (as well as consumers) have a responsibility to take the lead on tackling climate change by engaging with every possible opportunity to fix it. And while it might be two minutes to midnight on the Doomsday clock, the good news is we do still have time – and the capability.

Humans and AI: working together

Humans and intelligent machines have the potential to co-solve what has arguably become the world’s greatest challenge. Indeed, we’ve reached a point where the scale of the problem requires scalable AI.

AI has the power to augment human decisions at the systemic scale needed to protect the future of our planet in the face of climate volatility. It can support everything from biodiversity and carbon capture to business growth and sustainability, feeding into decisions on crops, land development, insurance and credit – and help the 80% of enterprises expecting climate change to result in major changes to their business.

As an AI-first ClimateTech business, we are building a next-generation platform to support critical decisions. Our scientific framework, rooted in data and computational statistics will make it possible to pool data from all corners of the earth and then use that data to monitor, model and forecast land productivity. Analysing multiple crops, geographies, soil and water, at a personalised level and on a scale that is beyond human capabilities, it will also enable us to feed signals directly into climate smart decisions.

The power of billions of good decisions

Humans have unwittingly made billions of bad climate decisions in the past. But thanks to science we are now able to make billions of good ones – enabled by a scientific approach at scale: in business, in government and on the ground.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson has said: “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

Cervest’s role is to help you make sense of it, through personalised climate signals.

Photography is by Kazuend on Unsplash.

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