How Technological Innovations Can Help With Nature In This Changing World

Humankind innovates, builds, and advances but always at the expense of our planet. In the last 200 years after the industrial revolution, we achieved so many things, from inventing all kinds of machines that make our lives easier, but none of it came without a cost. For every advancement we made, we used the resources our planet gave us. On our path building a modern civilization, we forgot that this planet is our home. In fact, in 2017, more than 15,000 scientists around our world signed the paper called the “last second notice” to humanity saying that we need to take rising greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and agriculture production very seriously as they significantly raise the risk of a catastrophic climate change.

Nowadays, more and more people around the world are starting to change the way they treat our planet. The question is “where to start?” The answer is as simple as it is complex, “it starts with us”, every one of us has a direct impact on the environment by choosing the way we eat, travel, and live our lives.

Technology vs Environment

Most of us draw the relationship of technology with the earth as a battle between nature and technology that can only have one winner. But this view of technology is like the technology itself outdated. In reality, the tech of tomorrow won’t be opposition to our planet. They’ll be working for nature as much as they are used to making life better for people everywhere.

As a technology analyst with over 20 years of working in an offshore software development company, I strongly believe that the efficient use of technology can save our environment from pollution and climate change in the near future.

In this blog, I’ll be touching on a few of the tech practices that can help our environment.

AI-augmented Agriculture:

If we look back, the 20th century was all about making agricultural machines bigger. However, this clearly won’t continue forever. Scientists and agricultural experts are now looking after plants at a more individual level. In order to do this, we need to make machines smarter, which literally means taking care of plants individually. This includes practices such as thinning, spraying, weeding and identifying fruits by providing yield and size estimates with the help of AI. Spotting weeds among the crop was a big challenge faced by farmers throughout our humanity. However, AI has now revolutionized this practice. AI powered machines can now be trained to recognize the shapes and textures of plants. Apart from weed detection, AI can be efficiently used by farmers to detect or predict crop diseases, collect nutritional data, track livestock, and much more.

Autonomous Electric Vehicles:

Regular cars that run on gasoline and pump CO2 straight out of the tailpipe and into our atmosphere. Electric cars on the other hand don’t burn any gasoline at all, hence they have zero emissions. Significant amounts of greenhouse emission drop for urban transport can be unlocked via eco-driving algorithms, traffic and route optimization, and driverless ride-sharing services.

Data Analytics Can Help

Currently, our purchase decisions are heavily driven by external influences. advertising is everywhere and is very effective. One of the most effective ways of advertising these days is by aggregating personal data fed into algorithms that can analyze our spending behavior, predict our needs and then present the product in a way that they are easy and accessible for us. What if we could use the same algorithms to drive a positive change? Instead of using the data to make us buy more products, we can use them to explain our environmental impact. The information from your bank and credit card company can be combined with publicly available information from social networks, search engines, and other sources and match it with sustainability information from a variety of sources such as corporate social responsibility reports, independent auditing companies. we get as much information as possible to calculate the environmental impact of our purchases. This can efficiently present the impact of a person’s day to day spending. In the future, we really hope we come to a point where we can give you full transparency of the entire supply chains of the product we buy.