Good Climate Solutions Need Good Policy—and AI Can Help With That - WIRED
Good Climate Solutions Need Good Policy-and AI Can Help With That | WIRED
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.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”