Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and we, as machine learning (ML) experts, may wonder how we can help. Here we describe how ML can be a powerful tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping society adapt to a changing climate. From smart grids to disaster management, we identify high impact problems where existing gaps can be filled by ML, in collaboration with other fields. Our recommendations encompass exciting research questions as well as promising business opportunities. We call on the ML community to join the global effort against climate change.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and we, as machine learning experts, may wonder how we can help. Here we describe how machine learning can be a powerful tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping society adapt to a changing climate. From smart grids to disaster management, we identify high impact problems where existing gaps can be filled by machine learning, in collaboration with other fields. Our recommendations encompass exciting research questions as well as promising business opportunities. We call on the machine learning community to join the global effort against climate change.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming scientific disciplines, but their full potential for climate change mitigation remains elusive. Here, we conduct a systematic review of applied machine learning studies that are of relevance for climate change mitigation, focusing specifically on the fields of remote sensing, urban transportation, and buildings. The relevant body of literature spans twenty years and is growing exponentially. We show that the emergence of big data and machine learning methods enables climate solution research to overcome generic recommendations and provide policy solutions at urban, street, building and household scale, adapted to specific contexts, but scalable to global mitigation potentials. We suggest a meta-algorithmic architecture and framework for using machine learning to optimize urban planning for accelerating, improving and transforming urban infrastructure provision. climate change mitigation a distant goal, but also making comparisons between local-scale studies difficult (Lamb, Callaghan, Creutzig, Khosla, & Minx, 2018). The IPCC's AR5 reports knowledge gaps on urban climate action (IPCC, 2014): there is too little understanding of the magnitude of the emissions reductions from altering urban form, and emissions savings from integrated infrastructure and land use planning. New analyses are required both to understand relationships (
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