How AI is Combating Climate Change: Improved Monitoring for a Healthier Planet
9/28/25, 6:00 AM
Deforestation Monitoring — Satellite images can be processed for deforestation related to illegal logging and viability degradation of forests and serve as immediate alerts to authorities.
Ambient Air Quality — Machine learning can evaluate pollution from bad air quality in urban settings, assess pollution spikes, and predict associated health impacts with the data evaluated from sensors placed around urban environments and their locations.
Marine and Coastal Environments — AI is being used to monitor coral reef health, increases in ocean temperatures or credits, and divergent plastic waste locations, for example.
Climate change is one of the largest global challenges humanity faces in the 21st century and is harming ecosystems and human livelihoods. The sheer amount of diverse and complex data can often exceed the ability of traditional monitoring methods to collect, analyze and make sense of the data, causing increasingly more delays in the identification of trends and threats associated with climate change, but a variety of tools are seeing increased application of data through AI. Much like traditional monitoring methods, AI can also be used for monitoring as well.
This means that monitoring systems can evolve into more sophisticated monitoring systems, allowing for the more well-rounded collection, examining, and prologue of environmental data, resulting in more rapid identification of threats from climate change for the purpose of determining best courses of action and responses to climate change. More Intelligent Monitoring with AI AI-based monitoring systems can combine satellite imagery, Internet of Things (IOT) sensors, drones, and machine learning algorithms to monitor changes and environmental variables with specificity.
Examples of relevant applications include:
AI's ability to identify patterns in environmental data allows for detection and predictions associated with climate-related threats and concerns, including weather events with significant harm (hurricanes, floods, droughts), sea level rise, coastal erosion, and ocean changes.
In conclusion, artificial intelligence is quickly emerging as a key partner in the global battle against climate change. In many cases, AI is helping us optimize energy use, facilitate smart grids, apply precision agriculture, and enhance climate modeling, to name just a few examples. AI can also provide the data that informs decisions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and conserving our natural resources.