Meet the Companies Using AI to Solve the World’s Greatest Environmental Challenges

November 2, 2023 Impact, Business, Arts, Design, Science, Technology

*AI For Good Summit SDGs. Image supplied by AI for Good*

Words: Daniel Simons

Ever since ChatGPT was unleashed in November 2022 artificial intelligence has captured our collective imaginations. Whether it’s the future of general intelligence or the disruptions caused by generative AI, almost everyone alive is waking up to the world-changing potential of these breakthrough technologies.

Mind-blowing headlines are filling up our newsfeeds on an almost daily basis: ‘AI helps a paralysed stroke victim speak after 30 years,’ AI ‘recreates a Pink Floyd album by reading people’s brainwaves,’ AI ‘lets us talk to animals.’ It seems like we can create anything we can dream up.

While the radical impacts of artificial intelligence are causing many of the world’s leading thinkers to spotlight the risks and ethical dilemmas of our new era, another group is asking an equally important question: ‘How can we harness the powers of artificial intelligence to solve the world’s greatest and most urgent challenges?’

AI for Good hosts a global summit and an ‘all year, always on’ digital platform where AI innovators and problem owners learn, build, and connect to help identify practical AI solutions to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The AI For the Planet Alliance has created a global platform designed to drive AI solutions to climate change at scale, and the AI X-Prize was set up to find and reward the most audacious and impactful AI businesses on the planet.

According to a report released by GPIA, Climate Change AI, and The Centre for Climate and AI, there is an enormous opportunity for artificial intelligence to help combat our environmental challenges. By distilling raw data into actionable information, improving predictions, optimising complex systems, and accelerating the development of almost every other form of scientific innovation imaginable, AI could help to supercharge environmental action.

Whether it’s tackling our greatest challenges head-on, or using the power of AI to inspire culture change, there is an almost unlimited role the new technology can play in shaping our collective future.

Here is a list of some of the world’s most innovative companies that are harnessing the power of AI to build a better world.

Unspun is creating sustainable, made-to-order jeans with AI

Unspun is a fashion company on a mission to reduce global human carbon emissions by 1% through automated, localised, and custom-fit manufacturing of apparel.

They’ve created a tool that uses robotics and a 3D weaving technology called ‘Vega’ to help the world realise zero-waste, circular production, and usher in a future where ‘nothing becomes trash.’

The company uses robotics for manufacturing and body scanning and AI software for digital automation, which allows them to create custom-fit denim and apparel.

To get measurements for their jeans, customers use Unspun’s free app to take a 360-degree, 10-second body scan that is accurate to the millimeter. A Digital Twin is then used to create the clothing. Their 3D spinner can turn yarn into clothes in minutes.

Unspun creates tailored blue jeans that are available online, which means there is no need for shops to hold unnecessary inventory that would otherwise go to waste.

The trailblazing company was recognised as a ‘Best Invention’ by TIME Magazine and a ‘Global Change Award’ winner by H&M.

As Unspun likes to put it: they’re ‘Sci-Fi’ fashion, without the ‘Fi’.

Mycro Harvest uses artificial intelligence to grow Mushrooms

Mycro Harvest uses AI-powered smart farms to grow mushrooms for use in vegan leather products and other sustainable innovations.

The mighty mushroom can be used as eco-plastics, bio-materials, psychological therapeutics, and as a source of alternative meat protein. With innovators around the world waking up to the magic of mycelium, global mushroom production can’t keep up with demand.

Using artificial intelligence, smart monitoring, and shipping container-sized units, Mycro Harvest is able to grow mushrooms bigger and faster, which makes mushroom-based products cheaper and more attractive than their planet-destroying counterparts.

They’re not alone in wanting to break the mushroom bottleneck. Clever Mushroom and Rainstick are also harnessing the powers of artificial intelligence to meet the demands of the shroom boom.

Mineral is helping farmers see the world in a whole new light

The world is going to have to produce more food in the next fifty years than it has produced in the previous 10,000, and it’s going to have to produce that food with less chemicals and fossil fuel fertilisers.

Mineral’s mission is to ‘discover the intelligence of plantkind to feed and protect humankind.’

Emerging from Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory, Mineral has created a ‘perception technology’ that lets farmers cultivate more productive and resilient crops.

Mineral uses rovers equipped with artificial intelligence, sensors, and robotics to find ways to grow more food more sustainably.

The Agtech company helps to measure plant features that have been previously impossible to measure, which opens farmers up to a whole new world of understanding.

Mineral captures data on pod counts, leaf area, flower counts, petiole lengths, and fruit defects to let farmers get a better understanding of how their crops are interacting with climate and environmental conditions.

The team has already captured over 800 million plant images and fed and digested them using their AI algorithms.

The team at Mineral believes their innovative technology will help to minimise food waste, increase resilience, protect crop yield, and reduce chemical and herbicide use.

*Image by Daniel Simons. Created in Midjourney*

WWF asks us to imagine a #worldwithoutnature

There’s an amazing community of scientists and innovators who are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to tackle our environmental problems head-on, but if we want to create real change, we need to create impact at the level of culture.

Every year WWF runs a #worldwithoutnature campaign where they ask companies to remove wildlife from their branding in order to highlight the dramatic loss of biodiversity around the world.

In 2023 they collaborated with the AI/CC community and Brave Bison, to invite their users to share works of art that were created using generative AI programs like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion.

With the world’s biodiversity crisis missing out on the attention it deserves, the WWF/AI/CC collaboration was a spectacular way to combine the powers of human creativity and artificial intelligence and let audiences around the globe feel what it would be like to live in a world without animals.

Sentinal uses AI to protect wildlife

Sentinal is a hardware and software platform that takes information from trail cameras, hydrophones, and acoustic recorders and uses intuitive AI to process environmental data in real time as it is captured.

By deploying smart adapters and smart cameras, Sentinal can be used to monitor invasive species, curb wildlife trafficking, track zoonotic diseases, and analyse changes in animal behaviour.

The software utilizes real-time satellite information and cellular networks to enable rapid responses to wildlife-related threats.

The Sentinal has already been used to identify rare jaguars in Costa Rica, inform wildlife crime officers of suspicious behaviour in South Africa, and monitor gorilla behaviour in the Congo.

The Ocean Cleanup is using AI to get plastic out of our oceans

As one of Microsoft’s AI for Earth partners, The Ocean Cleanup is using the latest in AI technology to help rid the world of plastic pollution.

Over 9 million tons of plastic enter our oceans every year. That plastic impacts over 600 marine species and ends up contaminating our food chain.

The Ocean Cleanup uses machine learning to identify plastic pollution in rivers and then simulate how it moves in our oceans. The AI software is able to label tens of thousands of images of plastic.

The insights help the company to stop plastic from reaching the ocean and remove the plastic that’s already causing damage.

With the use of this new technology, the Ocean Clean-up crew aims to reduce ocean plastics by 90% by 2040.