Technology giant IBM has launched its Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS), a new software as a service (SaaS) offering that allows businesses to prepare for and respond to business-disrupting weather and climate risks, assess their impact on the planet, and reduce the complexity of regulatory compliance and reporting.
The EIS employs artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze massive amounts of data to produce environmental intelligence businesses can use to address climate problems and work towards their sustainability goals.
Its two areas of focus are climate risk and` impact analysis, as well as carbon emission performance, accounting, and prediction. It utilizes a recently developed climate risk modelling framework to generate data on future wildfire and flooding risks.
Regarding carbon emissions, the suite utilizes technologies from IBM Research that applies natural language processing and automation to help companies estimate carbon emissions and identify opportunities to reduce these emissions across their operations.
It has four primary functions for businesses. First, it monitors a company’s areas of interest for disruptive environmental conditions such as severe weather, wildfires, flooding and air quality, and sends alerts once these conditions are detected.
Second, it predicts potential impacts of climate change and weather across the business using climate risk analytics.
Third, it offers insights into potential operational disruptions and prioritizes mitigation and response efforts.
Lastly, the EIS measures and reports on environmental initiatives and operationalizes carbon accounting. By doing so, it cuts down on the amount of reporting requested from the procurement and operations teams.
The EIS’ aims to improve on the currently available methods of environmental intelligence that are either tedious or complex as they require intensive manual labor, climate and data science skills, or computing power.
With the software, IBM said companies can streamline and automate their management of environmental risks and operationalize their underlying processes. Even better, its insights can be painlessly accessed through a dashboard, maps, alerts, and APIs.
According to global consulting firm Kearney, the decade from 2010 to 2019 was the most expensive on record in terms of natural disasters.
Damages and losses across industries totaled to $3 trillion — over $1 trillion more than the decade before. Asset damage and supply chain disruptions, however, are only the start. Businesses are also facing mounting pressure from consumers and investors to tackle the ongoing climate crises.
“Businesses needs actionable environmental insights to mitigate risks and get ahead of these challenges,” stated Hwee Lee Yeo, IBM Asia Pacific sales leader of AI applications, during the EIS launch last October 12.
“Our goal is to let technology take care of all the heavy lifting so that organizations can spend less resources collecting and curating these complex data and focus on analyzing it for insights and taking action to improve their business operation and performance,” added Yeo.
Arun Biswas, IBM consulting VP and senior partner for strategic sales and sustainability practice leader for Asia-Pacific, explained during the launch the wide range of industries the EIS could be applied in such as supply chain, energy, sustainable farming, and sustainable banking.
“We are addressing a very important need: The need for environmental intelligence. We strongly believe that this will be a foundational capability that enterprises will need to have given the ever-growing risks of extreme weather and climate change,” said Biswas during the launch.
