Potential adverse effects of climate change, known as climate risks, increasingly concern economists, city planners, ecologists, and many others. This week, we spoke with Dr. Ron Dembo, an expert in multi-factor scenario modeling, who is pioneering the use of AI to run climate risk assessments. For a transcript, please visit https://climatebreak.org/using-ai-for-climate-risk-assessment-with-dr-ron-dembo/.
As climate change accelerates, climate risks are beginning to impact every aspect of society from infrastructure and transportation to health, biodiversity, and air and water quality. A climate risk is the potential for climate change to have adverse consequences for a human or ecological system. Climate risks have implications for property and infrastructure, posing a threat to the global financial system at large.
The rate at which climate change and its associated risks are increasing can be reduced through mitigation and adaptation actions such as investing in green infrastructure and implementing energy efficiency standards. The assessment of climate risk involves the identification and quantification of the potential impacts of climate change on an organization, region, or community. Many organizations utilize climate risk assessments, which involve evaluating current and future vulnerabilities to climate-related hazards, taking into account factors such as infrastructure resilience, economic stability, and social vulnerability. To quantify those impacts, assessments typically estimate the level of damage in financial terms. In order to streamline this process and make it easier for companies to identify their potential risk, riskthinking.AI has developed a platform to leverage climate change risks and impacts through AI software.
Riskthinking.Ai integrates AI technology with climate change data to evaluate financial risk management through their development of the ClimateEarthDigitalTwin (CDT). The CDT integrates physical asset data with the latest climate projections like extreme weather and temperature shifts. Rather than using deterministic forecasts, CDT relies on probabilistic distributions to simulate a range of future scenarios and project changes in an asset's value over time. The CDT platform quantifies exposure and impacts from climate change. Riskthinking.Ai identifies which specific risk factors, such as extreme heat and floods, contribute to overall exposure. This approach can guide decision-making and help assess the complex risks posed by climate change and inform future infrastructure investments, risk mitigation, and climate adaptation strategies.
Riskthinking.Ai enables organizations to evaluate future financial impacts of climate change, integrating climate risks into business decisions. Countries especially vulnerable to climate change may benefit from this algorithm, as it allows for a better understanding of the threats they face due to a changing climate. By providing countries, governments, and corporations with a better understanding of how they may be at risk due to their geographical location and respective climate vulnerability, AI technology can guide decision-making to inform proper adaptation and mitigation into the future.
Although Riskthinking.Ai provides a tangible strategy in informing proper adaptation and mitigation, many argue that the use of AI technology to address environmental crises is counterintuitive due to AI’s negative impacts on the environment. By 2040, it is predicted that the emissions from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry will amount to 14% of global emissions, with the majority being driven through ICT infrastructure, specifically data centers and communication networks which AI relies upon to operate. In addition to the significant energy consumption required to power AI technology, a large amount of water is needed for cooling data centers. Further, AI relies on critical minerals and rare elements which are mined for unsustainability and the rapidly increasing data centers contribute to the growing body of electronic waste. However, as AI becomes increasingly applied to environmental problems, it can prove to be a valuable tool in combating climate change. Thus, working to reduce the environmental impact of AI technology will not only be vital in its application for climate risk assessments, but in mitigating the harmful effects brought about by its rapidly increasing societal demand.
Dr. Ron Dembo, founder and CEO of Riskthinking.Ai, has utilized his multi-factor scenario modeling expertise to create a data platform and analytics engine for measuring and managing climate financial risk. Dr. Ron Dembo has been an Associate Professor at Yale, visiting professor at MIT, and has received many awards for his work in risk management, optimization, and climate change.
For a transcript of this episode, please visit https://climatebreak.org/using-ai-for-climate-risk-assessment-with-dr-ron-dembo/.
Ethan: I’m Ethan Elkind, and this is Climate Break – climate solutions in a hurry. Today’s proposal: using AI to conduct climate risk analysis. Ron Dembo is Founder and CEO of Riskthinking.AI. He explains how their platform helps individuals understand and prepare for the potential impacts of climate change.
Dr. Dembo: Navigating the substantial environmental shifts ahead requires clarity, but not guesswork. We simulate future climate impacts realistically, and // it offers you the essential foresight you need for effective adaptation.
Ethan: Dembo explains how their technology differs from existing approaches.
Dr. Dembo: So what's traditionally out there is what's called a deterministic approach. That is, it's more like what if, what if the world was going to four degrees? But that doesn't tell you much about what you should do now. We use what's called the stochastic approach, which is taking full uncertainty into account, and in that way we look at thousands and thousands of different possible futures and aggregate them in a way that makes climate science sense.
Ethan: One of the benefits of this methodology, Dembo argues, is that it can be applied to a wide range of potential climate risks.
Dr. Dembo: So in Canada, for example, because of climate change, you have bugs moving up. And they've destroyed wide swaths of forests in British Columbia, and now they're moving up to the Boreal Forest of the North because it's getting warm up there and the bugs can survive. Many of the risks we face can be handled with the same kind of methodology.
Ethan: To learn more about Riskthinking.AI, visit climatebreak.org.