Wendy, Kate, hi. Kate, urban areas use more energy.
They produce more emissions.
So what can the private sector do in helping with this?
So at Google,
one of the big focus areas for us is how do we bring our technology to partners
in ways that can enable them to understand their carbon emissions and set
climate action targets.
And cities have been a really great area of focus for us. As you're noting,
cities represent about 70% of global emissions.
So several years ago we teamed up with the Global Covenant of Mayors to build
this tool called the Environmental Insights Explorer.
And it offers cities insights around the carbon footprint of their buildings,
their transportation, the solar potential of their rooftops.
And then in partnership with cities,
they've been coming to us asking us for new insights.
Things like where should they be planting trees to work on urban heat islands
and improve air quality, and also air quality data.
How do we get more hyper local information on air quality?
So this is now available in 42,000 cities around the world,
and we're seeing it really beginning to have impact. So in the city of San Jose,
they wanted to set an ambitious solar target.
They used this tool and they felt confident setting a gigawatt solar target.
And that's exactly the kind of impact we wanna see.
Wendy,
talk to me about how technology can contribute to mitigation and adaptation
solutions.
So technology is fundamentally a critical enabler to actually making
progress on any of this.
One of the examples we're working with many clients is using AI to help
understand how to be much more efficient in everything they're doing,
less electricity, less materials. And then on the adaptation front,
technology enables you to see so much more.
The geospatial analysis that we can do at massive scale,
but at a level of detail allows the kind of planning that we need to do for
adaptation. So technology is fundamental to making progress on both of those.
Okay. What are some of the solutions that Google is working on here,
if you can tell me?
Absolutely. So through our Google Cloud team,
we work with a lot of businesses as well.
And it's all around this theme that I think we're talking about a lot this week
at COP- ambitions to action. Companies have set bold climate action targets.
We've set a net zero target by 2030 for Google.
Many other companies have done this as well,
and now they need help achieving that target.
So we are bringing our technology to the table.
We've worked with companies like UPS to help them to optimize their routes.
We're seeing major efficiency opportunities,
10 million gallons of fuel saved through doing that optimization.
Or companies like Unilever have net zero targets and zero deforestation targets.
And they came to us and said,
we're having a really hard time getting visibility upstream in our palm supply
chain. So we brought to the table Google Earth engine, you mentioned geospatial.
An incredible geospatial tool enables us to go deep on insights into
what's happening on the ground so they can achieve their targets.
Of course, climate disasters differ across the globe.
So how can technology help here in mitigation and adaptation strategies?
So of course we know we're already facing impacts of climate change today.
And so this is a place where we've seen a really powerful use case for AI.
We have a team here in the region based in Israel, our Google research team,
and they've been working on flood alerts providing AI to enable
much better forecasting of flooding so that we can provide SOS alerts to
individuals and also give governments more early warning signs.
So we started this work in a few communities where flooding is a major issue in
India and Bangladesh, and then we've been using a machine learning model,
It's getting trained and now we're able to expand much further.
So we just announced last week, it's now gone to 15 countries in Africa,
also dealing with flooding from Cameroon to South Africa.
Wendy, to change it, you need to be able to measure it.
And that unfortunately is one of the problems with companies.
They have the goals, they have the ambitions,
but tracking emissions is a very difficult process.
So how can technology help here and also more generally companies to achieve
their climate target goals?
Technology enables you to measure things right now and understanding
your baseline in the first place and then understanding what actions you can
take to actually change and improve on that baseline become incredibly
important. One of our tools, C02.AI,
is doing that with clients in understanding and measuring the baseline,
finding actions, and then enabling that progress.
That becomes incredibly important.
The other thing I would say to what you were referencing, Kate,
is technology provides so many nudges for all of us all day.
And when we think about the behavioral side of what we all need to do
differently on climate,
the nudges that technology provide us in the right direction on what we can do
to support climate become very important.
I just wanna come in on that.
That's another pillar of our strategy - how do we enable everyone to be a part
of the solution?
What we know through Google search trends is that people's interest in things
like buying an electric vehicle, a heat pump,
putting solar on their roof are at an all-time high in 2022.
And what we see from the science from the recent IPCC AR6 report is that
these individual actions can add up to about a 5% impact on emissions.
So this is where we think we have a huge opportunity with our products like
Google Maps, where now in the US and Canada, 40 countries across Europe,
the most fuel efficient route is now the default in Google Maps.
We call this eco routing,
as long as it has a similar ETA and just after a few months of having that in
the market,
it's over a hundred thousand cars off the road equivalent in emissions
reductions.
Okay, Wendy, thank you so much.
Thank you.