A recent addition to the realm of organizations leveraging artificial intelligence to address global environmental challenges is a novel nonprofit entity.
Earth05, headquartered in Barcelona and officially unveiled at the World Economic Forum, is dedicated to harnessing AI capabilities to tackle the escalating worldwide water crisis anticipated in the forthcoming years.
Water, an indispensable element impacting virtually all aspects of human existence, is now confronting a pervasive global scarcity issue, as highlighted by Upmanu Lall, the director of Columbia University’s Water Center, in an interview with ABC News.
The current scenario reveals that approximately 2.2 billion individuals worldwide lack access to adequately managed potable water, according to the United Nations. Projections suggest that by 2030, the global demand for freshwater will surpass available supply by 40%, leaving around 1.6 billion people without access to safely managed drinking water, as outlined by the World Economic Forum.
Earth05 aims to counteract this impending crisis by integrating water, education, and AI across all its endeavors, with a goal to enhance the lives of 500 million people by 2030 through collaborative efforts of ingenious minds, as articulated by Maria Dahrieh, the founder and president of Earth05, in an interview with ABC News.
The nonprofit will leverage cutting-edge technology to analyze forthcoming systems, encompassing water consumption patterns and water availability based on predictive climate conditions. Dahrieh emphasized that AI will enable the realization of these predictive capabilities for the first time.
AI presents various avenues to mitigate the global water crisis, including streamlining delivery systems for enhanced efficiency, identifying water leakages (which can account for 10% to 30% of water supply in the U.S.), and forecasting contaminant spikes, as elucidated by Pablo Ortiz, a climate and water scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in discussions with ABC News.
Furthermore, the optimization of irrigation systems through AI holds significant importance, considering that a substantial portion of global water usage (ranging from 70% to 90%, depending on the region) is allocated to agricultural activities, noted Lall. AI can also assess the suitability of crops grown in specific regions based on water and climate conditions.
Ortiz highlighted another innovative application of AI in addressing the water crisis—education. Utilizing virtual reality headsets to depict the dire conditions in water-scarce regions could effectively underscore the urgency of the issue.
Dahrieh emphasized the pivotal role of AI in providing essential predictability to explore potential solutions to the crisis.
While a mere fraction (approximately 1.2%) of the world’s freshwater constitutes drinkable surface water, the majority is stored in groundwater (30.1%) and glaciers/ice caps (68.7%), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Research endeavors undertaken by Earth05 are poised to uncover methods for accessing frozen or deep-groundwater reservoirs, Dahrieh affirmed.
One of the prominent challenges influencing water availability is the disparity between supply and demand, exacerbated by a burgeoning global population, experts noted.
Regions such as the Middle East, where desalination is a primary water source for several nations, along with areas like Mexico, Brazil, India, China, and vulnerable regions in the U.S., are particularly at risk, according to Lall.
The experts also underscored the impact of climate change and natural climate variability on global water resources. Climate change contributes to prolonged droughts, reduced snowpack feeding rivers, and heightened flood risks during extreme precipitation events, Ortiz explained.
Despite its benefits, AI itself consumes substantial amounts of water, with research indicating that every five to 50 prompts on ChapGPT utilize about 16 ounces of water for cooling the servers. Comparatively, producing a single hamburger patty requires approximately 600 gallons of water.
The historical underestimation of water’s significance has led to its treatment as a political commodity rather than a fundamental human right, noted Dahrieh. Ortiz emphasized the critical importance of water as a vital natural resource, essential for human sustenance.
In conclusion, Ortiz highlighted the life-threatening consequences of water scarcity, contamination, and inadequate water access, emphasizing the critical nature of addressing these challenges promptly and effectively.
