AI tools can help reduce climate risks, State strategy says

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The release of the National Adaptation and Resilience Planning Strategy comes as a series of wildfires continue to burn across the Los Angeles area.
The U.S. can leverage artificial intelligence capabilities to help prepare for the long-term effects of climate change, the State Department said in an 898-page blueprint released on Friday.
The department’s National Adaptation and Resilience Planning Strategy outlined the potential impacts of a warming planet on various industries and communities and identified steps that can be taken to mitigate these risks.
Although the strategy offers a broad range of solutions — including ways to strengthen physical infrastructure and conduct scenario-based planning — it said AI can be used “to reduce future uncertainty, hedge against uncertainty by selecting actions that work across multiple possible futures or approach adaptation decisions as a long-term process to be revisited over time.”
According to the document, coastal and marine habitats that are particularly vulnerable to climate change could benefit from “new coastal change modeling approaches using machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
Similarly, AI algorithms “could more generally improve the effectiveness of early-warning systems” when it comes to the spread of vector-borne diseases, which the strategy said are exacerbated by “warmer winters, increases in extreme weather events and other physical stressors with widespread significant impacts on ecosystems.”
The strategy said, however, that “next-generation sensors, analytics and forecasting technologies,” could have the greatest impact when it comes to combating the impacts of climate change.
“Developing and deploying these tools would unlock powerful opportunities to rapidly scale, implement and adjust climate resilience solutions,” the blueprint said, noting that AI and advanced predictive algorithms “provide new capabilities for advanced monitoring, understanding and responding to climate-related opportunities and hazards across scales and sectors.”
The strategy said AI has already helped the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory develop a tool to “map vulnerability to climate change down to the block and building level,” and that Energy’s Office of Electricity is also using the advanced capabilities to develop “a comprehensive resilience modeling system for all North American energy infrastructure.”
According to the report, the use of additional sensors and other monitoring tools could also help officials better forecast and prepare for climate change-related disasters, with AI and advanced predictive algorithms powering these technologies to monitor health risks and emergencies. These technologies could prove to be particularly helpful when responding to wildfires, such as those currently devastating communities in the Los Angeles area.
“One existing tool in the context of active wildland fires, the AirNow web application, leverages community-based air quality sensor data in the Fire and Smoke Map — a collaborative effort between the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and EPA — to provide information on active wildland fires, smoke and air quality, and recommended protective actions,” the document said.
Federal officials have also been piloting the use of AI-powered fire detection sensors to provide earlier warnings for those living in high-risk regions.
State noted in the strategy that the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate has collaborated with the U.S. Fire Administration to deploy alpha phase wildfire sensors across the country. The document said these tools have collected “over 1,000,000 hours of data in the field to enhance the artificial intelligence learning algorithms now being deployed in the beta version.”
Following a series of wildfires in August 2023 across Hawaii — including one that decimated the town of Lahaina — the two agencies announced that they were deploying 80 wildfire sensors and 16 wind sensors across the state to help safeguard against future fires.