Overview

The Alan Turing Institute brings together researchers, data scientists and expert practitioners to explore, understand and apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address global challenges spanning environmental, healthcare, social, economic, political and engineering systems. The Turing, as the national centre for data science and AI in the UK, convenes experts from different domains who collaborate at the national and international levels, raising awareness of the ethical use of AI, influencing policy-making and integrating digital efforts across sectors to build a more sustainable future for our society.

In this report, we review projects under the Environment and Sustainability theme within AI for Science and Government (ASG) (ASG) – a five-year, £38.8 million research programme that has accelerated and scaled AI efforts through multi-disciplinary, collaborative and innovative data science.

All ASG projects have been carried out in partnership with the UK-wide stakeholders in academia, industry, and government sectors, highlighting their outcomes and impacts on data science and AI to tackle environmental and climate challenges.

Under the following areas of environmental and climate research, we have highlighted examples from ASG research in this report:

  • Monitoring the environment.
  • Forecasting environmental change.
  • Simulating the human cost of climate change.
  • Adapting to climate change.

This report provides successful examples and evidence for AI/Machine Learning implementation in environmental research while addressing the following challenge areas:

  • Facilitate interdisciplinary, inclusive and equitable collaboration.
  • Create open-source, reproducible and ethical AI technology.
  • Pioneer integration of cross-disciplinary data and enable its real-world deployment
  • Informing community of ethical use of AI

A white paper summarising the learnings and recommendations drawn from this work has been published online as Tackling climate change with data science and AI. Please cite that as Conner, A., Hosking, S., Lloyd, J., Rao, A., Shaddick, G., & Sharan, M. (2023). Tackling climate change with data science and AI. Zenodo. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7712969