Environment Intelligence: IBM Links AI and Climate Analysis for Companies

The interface of AI, business intelligence, and environment received a big boost when recently IBM launched its Environment Intelligence Suite (EIS), an AI-driven software meant to facilitate preparatory measures regarding climate risks with climate analysis. Climate risks threaten to adversely affect pre-planned operations and it is not easy to take instant measures when such risks as severe weather, flooding, wildfires degraded air quality become a reality.

The EIS, formerly known as IBM Weather Operations Center, contains a full range of weather decision support tools for businesses across many sectors of the economy. It lets companies harness an extensive set of weather APIs, including both current conditions and historical data, on-demand from any point on earth, forecast data on-demand, long-range seasonal conditions up to seven months out, and probabilistic weather APIs for scenario planning. In addition to the data from weather APIs, the geospatial analytics platform within the EIS Suite provides 6 petabytes of analytics-ready data sets that help generate insights for climate analysis with AI.

The best thing about the EIS is that it is an integrated entity of AI, critical environmental data sets, climate risks modeling and analytics, and carbon accounting capabilities. According to IBM, it will enable the business leaders to plan more effectively with the following measures:

• Monitor for disruptive environmental conditions such as severe weather, wildfires, flooding, and air quality and send alerts when detected.
• Predict potential impacts of climate change and weather across the business using climate risk analytics.
• Gain insights into potential operational disruptions and prioritize mitigation and response efforts.
• Measure and report on environmental initiatives and operationalize carbon accounting, while reducing the burden of this reporting on procurement and operations teams.

IBM is also confident that it will also enable the business leaders to negotiate the regulatory mechanisms and compliance issues more effectively through the integration of environmental intelligence and climate analysis.

The EIS has three fold-objectives— first, it will facilitate the protection of companies from climate-related damage to their assets; second, it will minimize disruptions to supply chain operations; third, it will also help to meet the expectation of consumers and shareholders that their companies should be top performers as environment-conscious leaders. No less important, the EIS will not only provide more security to the companies but will also serve the growing number of environment-conscious shoppers who are ready to pay more price for environment-friendly products.

Risks emerge both immediately and in the long run. In most cases, they do not emerge separately and often combine both. Risks will never go away. But the formulation and implementation of resilient planning and associated strategies to mitigate climate risks are of vital importance through climate analysis. Tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google among others are periodically coming out with products and services designed to address various climate issues, including carbon emission, head-on. The EIS seems to come as a landmark development in this context.