Hamid, welcome.
There's so much talk about AI, GenAI at the moment, across
every area of our lives.
Just tell me, what role or what part is it playing in the
climate crisis?
AI can contribute to mitigation action, adaptation and
resilience action, but also can help accelerate the
breakthrough.
The scientific breakthrough we are all expecting in the future
to help manage the transition faster and better. On adaptation
and resilience,
it can help decision-makers come up with an adaptation and
resilience plan faster.
It can also help to identify risks that are coming in the
coming week, coming months, faster.
So those early warning systems are critical.
They can not only save lives, but they can also help the
authority to organize around facing imminent climate risk.
For businesses specifically looking to hit their
sustainability targets, what role does AI have to play there,
and what can businesses do?
Is it just a question of of throwing lots of money at it?
No, I do think business leaders need to think about advanced
analytics and AI as a way to better understand their
baseline. For example, in terms of emissions, to build better
and assess and measure the environmental impacts.
Because there is so much complexity around this for
business leaders, they need to rely on those tools to actually
facilitate the Scope 3 emission baseline, for example, or to
estimate what would be along the value chain, their impact on the
environment.
Leveraging those analytical tools and the power of AI will
help them do that faster, and better.
Going forward,
how do you see AI and tech playing out in the climate
crisis?
Do you see it as the great hope that many have called it, or
could it bring worse inequality, for example, and other sort of
risks?
I do think today, the access to AI solutions for developing
countries, for the general public, for me, is fundamental.
Why?
If a citizen better understands what's the impact of climate
change in his neighborhood, he will actually get those
information
to change his behavior towards political leaders.
If a developing country has access to those tools and
methodology, we believe they can actually accelerate building
their own action plan, and also be able to ask for private
sector and multilateral support to actually activate those
adaptation and resilience plans and make them happen.
How do leaders make the most of these opportunities that AI can
present, but also mitigate the risks?
So in terms of mitigating the risk, the risk is, for me,
transparency, and also, equal access.
And the transparency element is: we need to make sure that
whatever is reported by corporate, by countries, in
terms of reporting on emissions, or reporting on climate risk, is
actually done with the right methodology, with the right
data, and that everybody can have access to challenge that.
Why is that so important?
It's important because if you do that, if you have academic
review on climate risk assessment, that is done for a
given city, or a given country, then you are sure that you avoid
any bias included in or onto the system.
And also, it actually increases the level of trust that the
stakeholders and the population have on those assessments.
And for a corporate, we need to make sure also that whatever
they report in terms of emission is actually reflecting reality.
So the models, the data, the methodology that is used to
assess those emissions, to assess climate risk, needs to be
sufficiently open.
So there is a way to actually activate this: it is by thinking
about Global Commons for data, foundational models, and also,
methodology to get those elements shared, reviewed, and
accepted by the stakeholders.
There are several efforts from the United Nations toward
building those Global Commons, and I hope it comes fast.
Excellent, Hamid.
Thank you so much.