Climate change and digital transformation are two of humanity’s greatest challenges. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and cloud computing have enormous potential to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions to safeguard biodiversity, manage agricultural land use more efficiently and ensure water availability to name just a few areas of application.
It was against this backdrop that Microsoft kicked off its AI for Earth programme five years ago, a global initiative placing data and artificial intelligence technology in the hands of experts to fuel the development of sustainability solutions which improve the environment and ecosystems.
As part of this Microsoft initiative and in partnership with the Catalan Government and CIDAI (Centre of Innovation for Data Tech and Artificial Intelligence), a hackathon was held in which a number of practitioners and multidisciplinary working groups got the chance to showcase and present transformational ideas on how to use AI to support environmental sustainability. The event hosted an ideas generation forum involving experts from the technology community, sustainability and the environment, public and academic institutions, developers and businesses to put forward and design data- and AI-driven innovation solutions to help address sustainability challenges in biodiversity, agriculture, water and climate change in Catalonia.
