Carbon Chemist

Tag: wired impact

  • Good Climate Solutions Need Good Policy—and AI Can Help With That

    Good Climate Solutions Need Good Policy—and AI Can Help With That

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    To achieve real climate solutions, changing behavior and developing technology is not enough, says Michal Nachmany, founder and CEO of the environmental nonprofit Climate Policy Radar. “A lot of this is policy,” she says.

    We need better laws, policies, and regulations, as well as needing to hold policymakers and corporates to account, because they’re not doing a good enough job, she argues. The problem is that understanding what policies are out there, and what works and what doesn’t, is an enormous task. So Climate Policy Radar’s goal is to use AI to understand the sprawling climate policy space, to help make sure that future laws and policies are evidence-based.

    “We gathered together all of the climate laws and policies and strategies and action plans that every single government in this world has on its books,” she explains. “There are 470,000 pages in there—or 4.5 million paragraphs.”

    To analyze these using general language AI systems is not enough, Nachmany says. “They source not-credible data sources, they hallucinate, they do all sorts of things that we really don’t want to bring into our decision making,” she says. “So we use augmented intelligence, using human expertise to teach machines.”

    As a not-for-profit, Climate Policy Radar offers its constantly updated data for free, and it has a community of practitioners available to collaborate with anyone who works with or seeks to influence decision-makers.

    “The people who need the data the most are the ones least able to pay for it,” she says. “So, there’s a really strong climate justice element to this.” She invites anyone who wanted to collaborate to contact her: “We’re just at the beginning of our journey.”

    This article appears in the March/April 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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  • A Discarded Plan to Build Underwater Cities Will Give Coral Reefs New Life

    A Discarded Plan to Build Underwater Cities Will Give Coral Reefs New Life

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    A combination of AI, a wild 1970s plan to build underwater cities, and a designer creating furniture on the seabed around the Bahamas might be the solution to the widespread destruction of coral reefs. It could even save the world from coastal erosion.

    Industrial designer Tom Dixon and technologist Suhair Khan, founder of AI incubator Open-Ended Design, are collaborating on regenerating the ocean floor. “Coral reefs are endangered by climate change, shipping, development, and construction—but they’re vital,” Khan explains. “They cover 1 percent of the ocean floor, but they’re home to more than 25 percent of marine life.”

    Currently, Dixon says, coastal erosion is prevented by dropping concrete structures to strengthen the coastline. These damage marine life and ecosystems—but coral could be a “regenerative replacement.”

    Dixon thought of the idea having come across architect Wolf Hilbertz’s plan to build a city underwater, then float it to the surface. In 1976, Hilbertz invented Mineral Accretion Technology: a charged metal framework that accumulates calcium carbonate in seawater like a kettle accumulates limescale in hard-water areas. The result is a limestone deposit known as Biorock.

    “It also grows back eroded reefs and regenerates coral, and species like oysters and sea grass grow twice as fast,” explains Dixon, who has experimented with the technique by creating limestone furniture off the coast of the Bahamas. The duo now collaborate, using AI to predict the outcome of importing Biorock to different sites at different water temperatures, in different weather conditions, with different amounts of solar power.

    They aim to trial their work off the coast of Northern Australia, according to Khan, and hope to recruit affected local communities to advise and champion their plans.

    This article appears in the March/April 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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  • Tech Still Isn’t Doing Enough to Care for the Environment

    Tech Still Isn’t Doing Enough to Care for the Environment

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    We are in a climate crisis, and technology can be either a part of the problem or a force for good, says Greenpeace CTO Priscilla Chomba-Kinywa. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, she explains, we have “less than seven years before Earth becomes really difficult to live on.” Last year alone, the world witnessed wildfires in North America, floods in Southern Africa, and even the double tragedy of floods and fires in places like Greece, she says.

    Social media allows people from across the world to communicate, but “we’re seeing misinformation, disinformation, and a wanton disregard for sustainability by some of these platforms—and unfortunately, people don’t have many other options.”

    Chomba-Kinywa says that VCs, startups, investors, and technologists should invest in alternative platforms “that are green, that are ethical, that are value-based, and that give us an alternative to what we have right now, being built by people so passionate about the environment that they will not sell out in the name of profits.”

    Even though conventional investment is supposed to maximize shareholder value, she argues, investing in these platforms is a price worth paying, as customers will soon be demanding action.

    Chomba-Kinywa salutes companies already taking action—such as Hyundai, which recently committed to stop supplying the heavy machinery used for illegal mining in the Amazon. This was possible, she says, through the use of satellite imagery and pressure from leaders in Indigenous communities, which led to a report that Hyundai couldn’t ignore.

    Good data, she explains, is vital—Greenpeace has been using it since 2009 to persuade some tech giants to switch to 100 percent renewable energy. For those that refused, the campaigning NGO just walked away. Other organizations should do the same, she says.

    “What if you could use your influence to apply pressure on these organizations to change?” she asks. “Say, ‘We’ve looked at the data, we’ve looked at your plans. You’re not doing enough, and we won’t give you our money.’ Then maybe we can make a little bit more of a change.”

    Finally, she says businesses need to work with communities from places like Senegal, Zambia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Mexico to understand and support their movements. “Sit with the elders in their communities, listen to the Indigenous knowledge that allowed them to coexist with nature, and start to reapply some of those principles,” she suggests. “They are scrambling for their lives.”

    Chomba-Kinywa also says that conversations on AI need to focus on the planet. “We’re talking about values, ethics, and putting guardrails in place—but we can’t do that without talking about the environment,” she argues. “We need to think through the environmental cost of AI. It has the potential to help us solve some of humanity’s grand challenges, but that’s only useful if humanity has a livable planet.”

    This article appears in the March/April 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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  • Wild Animals Should Be Paid for the Benefits They Provide Humanity

    Wild Animals Should Be Paid for the Benefits They Provide Humanity

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    We need to understand the value of nature if we want to protect it—and that should include paying ecosystems for keeping us alive, argues Ian Redmond, head of conservation for not-for-profit streaming platform Ecoflix and cofounder of Rebalance Earth, a company that aims to build a sustainable, resilient, and equitable economy. He’s trying to change the damaging equation where “if the minerals under the ground are worth more than the trees and the animals above the ground, then traditionally, the trees and the animals have to go.”

    Pricing nature’s benefits would help protect it, he suggests. Wildlife tourism shows that people are prepared to pay up to $1,500 simply to spend an hour in the company of an elephant in Rwanda, he points out—so tourists already know how valuable nature is. But what about local people? Filmmakers should share the profits of their wildlife films with those who protect or depend on the ecosystems they film.

    “The irony is that people who live in the developing world, where many of these documentaries are made, don’t get to see them because their national TV stations can’t afford to buy them,” he explains. “We should make people care about the wildlife in the countries where the wildlife lives.”

    And we should pay animals like elephants for their essential arboreal gardening, he argues. “Apes, elephants, and birds are seed-dispersal agents in tropical forests,” he adds. “They swallow seeds and deposit them in their droppings miles away.”

    This has a hugely beneficial effect locally and globally, because trees do so much more than just store carbon. A study in the Congo Basin found that the amount of wood in a forest where elephants still lived was up to 14 percent greater than one where elephants had died out. That basin sets up weather systems that ultimately produce rain in Britain and Europe.

    “Do you think any proportion of what you pay for your [electricity] goes to protect the elephants and the gorillas in the Congo Basin planting the trees that fill the hydro schemes in Scotland?” he says. “Not a penny. There is no valuation of that ecosystem’s service that every one of us benefits from.”

    Ralph Chami, formerly assistant director of the International Monetary Fund, calculated that the value an elephant provides the world during its life is worth around $1.75 million dollars per animal. “That’s roughly $30,000 a year, or $80 a day if the elephant were being paid for the service it’s providing the world,” he pointed out. “But, of course, no one’s paying that.”

    So, it’s time to pay the bill. “I want every gorilla, every orangutan, and every animal to be valued for what they do for the ecosystem, and for us clever humans to construct a system that allows that to happen,” he says. “At the last count, that was estimated at about $700 billion a year. It’s a lot of money. It’s not going to come out of the government’s coffers, it’s not going to come out of philanthropy, but it could come out of the global economy if we construct it thus.”

    This article appears in the March/April 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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  • Climate Finance Is Targeting the Wrong Industries

    Climate Finance Is Targeting the Wrong Industries

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    To achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, we have to increase the amount of capital invested in climate tech by 590 percent, says Daria Saharova, managing partner at VC World Fund, a European venture capital firm specializing in climate tech. While European funds, including the UK’s, have €19.6 trillion ($21.1 trillion) under management—and invested €19.6 billion in 2022—that’s not enough. We need to invest at least €1 trillion every year.

    The good news? “Europe is leading the world in patent applications for climate technology,” she says. “Twenty-eight percent of all patents in this field originate in Europe, so almost one-third of the technology needed is created here.”

    The problem, Saharova warns, is the misalignment between emissions and venture capital. Forty-eight percent of VC investment in 2022 was into mobility technology, such as e-scooters. Mobility accounts for only 15 percent of emissions, while more polluting industries like manufacturing, food and agriculture, and the built environment are underfunded. “Eighty-five percent of emissions receive only 52 percent of funding,” according to Saharova.

    This matters, she explains, because personal behavior change will reduce only 4.3 percent of emissions. Technologies already in the market will account for 49.8 percent—meaning technologies under development and in need of investment will need to fill in the rest. “Forty-six percent of emissions will be reduced by technology that’s yet to be developed, and this is the tech we desperately need,” she says. “And we need venture capital.”

    Venture capital has had its fingers burned in this area before, she points out. “Between 2008 and 2013 there was a lot of investment and a lot of failures. So right now, R&D accounts for 35 percent of investment, private equity 37 percent, and venture capital just 13 percent of climate tech funding.”

    There’s a huge opportunity for VCs—as the fast rise of late-entrant private equity shows. The return on new investment in climate tech between 2015 and 2019 stands at almost 22 percent. But how do VCs pick the right investment areas when they often lack the skills?

    “We need a crystal ball for a tech product’s sales, the target market, the tech’s influence on that market, its climate footprint, and interrelations with other solutions—in particular, some serious climate science,” she explains. “That’s a long list.”

    World Fund has developed a benchmarking system called the Climate Performance Potential, or CPP, which is gradually filtering through to academia. It’s a blend of comparing the potential a startup has to avoid or reduce emissions, a willingness to ignore the startup’s own predictions, and its ability to look at the Total Addressable Market (TAM), which World Fund calls the Total Avoidable Emissions. This pairs a team’s ability to execute with an almost competitive product in a climate-effective technology bucket to understand the order of magnitude that your multiple can achieve.

    “This model is focused on the technology rather than the company, so it can be applied to large organizations as well,” she explains. “It allows us to measure the carbon market for a technology compared to others by 2040. We need more private capital and public capital, and this model makes it easier for them to predict success.”

    This article appears in the March/April 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.

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