Autonomous Sustainability Monitoring

Artificially intelligent software used for data processing to tackle issues on sustainability, both in terms of natural resource protection and improvement of industrial and agricultural practices.
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Technology Life Cycle

Technology Life Cycle

Growth

Marked by a rapid increase in technology adoption and market expansion. Innovations are refined, production costs decrease, and the technology gains widespread acceptance and use.

Technology Readiness Level (TRL)

Technology Readiness Level (TRL)

Prototype Demonstration

Prototype is fully demonstrated in operational environment.

Technology Diffusion

Technology Diffusion

Early Adopters

Embrace new technologies soon after Innovators. They often have significant influence within their social circles and help validate the practicality of innovations.

Autonomous Sustainability Monitoring

Also known as Automated Environmental Monitoring, this technology uses sensors, satellite imagery, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) to collect and analyze data related to sustainability in real-time. It helps businesses and government organizations to measure, track, and optimize their environmental impact, energy consumption, and resource usage. This technology is being applied in various sectors, from commercial buildings and industrial facilities to agricultural settings and transportation fleets.

This solution works by deploying a network of sensors and data collection devices throughout a facility, location, or equipment, which capture real-time data on energy use, water consumption, waste production, greenhouse gas emission, and other sustainability metrics. The data is then transmitted to a centralized platform where machine learning algorithms and AI models process it and generate insights and recommendations for optimizing sustainability performance. Emerging systems might also include satellite imagery that provides sustainability metrics.

The primary benefit of Autonomous Sustainability Monitoring is that it helps organizations to identify areas where they can reduce their environmental impact and save resources while also improving operational efficiency and reducing costs. For example, it can identify areas where energy is being wasted or where water usage is higher than necessary and provide recommendations for reducing consumption.

Additionally, the technology can provide live alerts and notifications when sustainability metrics exceed predetermined thresholds, allowing organizations to take immediate action to prevent or mitigate potential sustainability issues. It can also generate reports and dashboards that provide detailed insights into sustainability performance over time, which can be used to track progress and demonstrate accountability to stakeholders.

Future Perspectives

Instead of working as a single application solely reserved for companies, this technology could function as a collective monitoring platform for social and environmental impact by tackling global environmental challenges. For that, AI initiatives are creating open-source tools and APIs to provide models and the base infrastructure for enterprises that want to make their businesses greener and hold themselves more accountable.

Considering that all of these tools are available for free, governments and small initiatives could take advantage of this software as a means to pursue accountability and how their practices fit into global objectives in terms of sustainability and global warming. In combination with other technologies and systems such as blockchain and the internet of things, these initiatives could spread in smart cities and add a new layer of sustainable accountability to urban spaces too. Finally, this technology might be able to analyze entire industrial segments, making it easier to create a future of industrial ecology and foster more circular economic practices. This could help companies be viewed as more trustworthy in the eyes of consumers.

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Sources
With the increasing public interest in artificial intelligence (AI), there is also increasing interest in learning about the benefits that AI can deliver to society. This book focuses on research advances in AI that benefit the conservation of wildlife, forests, coral reefs, rivers, and other natural resources. It presents how the joint efforts of researchers in computer science, ecology, economics, and psychology help address the goals of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Written at a level accessible to conservation professionals and AI researchers, the book offers both an overview of the field and an in-depth view of how AI is being used to understand patterns in wildlife poaching and enhance patrol efforts in response, covering research advances, field tests and real-world deployments. The book also features efforts in other major conservation directions, including protecting natural resources, ecosystem monitoring, and bio-invasion management through the use of game theory, machine learning, and optimization.
As the transformative power of AI crosses all economic and social sectors, the use of it as a modern technique for the simulation and/or forecast of various indicators must be viewed as a tool for sustainable development. The present paper reveals the results of research on modeling and simulating the influences of four economic indicators (the production in industry, the intramural research and development expenditure, the turnover and volume of sales and employment) on the evolution of European Economic Sentiment using artificial intelligence. The main goal of the research was to build, train and validate an artificial neural network that is able to forecast the following year’s value of economic sentiment using the present values of the other indicators. Research on predicting European Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) using artificial neural networks is a starting point, with work on this subject almost inexistent, the reason being mainly that ESI is a composite of five sectoral confidence indicators and is not thought to be an emotional response to the interaction of the entrepreneurial population with different economic indicators. The authors investigated, without involving a direct mathematical interaction among the indicators involved, predicting ESI based on a cognitive response. Considering the aim of the research, the method used was simulation with an artificial neural network and a feedforward network (structure 4-9-6-1) and a backward propagation instruction algorithm was built. The data used are euro area values (for 19 countries only—EA19) recorded between 1999 and 2016, with Eurostat as the European Commission’s statistical data website. To validate the results, the authors imposed the following targets: the result of the neural network training error is less than 5% and the prediction verification error is less than 10%. The research outcomes resulted in a training error (after 30,878 iterations) of less than 0.099% and a predictive check error of 2.02%, which resulted in the conclusion of accurate training and an efficient prediction. AI and artificial neural networks, are modeling and simulation methods that can yield results of nonlinear problems that cover, for example, human decisions based on human cognitive processes as a result of previous experiences. ANN copies the structure and functioning of the biological brain, having the advantage through learning and coaching processes (biological cognitive), to copy/predict the results of the thinking process and, thus, the process of choice by the biological brain. The importance of the present paper and its results stems from the authors’ desire to use and popularize modern methods of predicting the different macroeconomic indices that influence the behavior of entrepreneurs and therefore the decisions of these entrepreneurs based on cognitive response more than considering linear mathematical functions that cannot correctly understand and anticipate financial crises or economic convulsions. Using methods such as AI, we can anticipate micro- and macroeconomic developments, and therefore react in the direction of diminishing their negative effects for companies as well as the national economy or European economy.
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The role of sustainable mobility and its impact on society and the environment is evident and recognized worldwide. Nevertheless, although there is a growing number of measures and projects that deal with sustainable mobility issues, it is not so easy to compare their results and, so far, there is no globally applicable set of tools and indicators that ensure holistic evaluation and facilitate replicability of the best practices. In this paper, based on the extensive literature review, we give a systematic overview of relevant and scientifically sound indicators that cover different aspects of sustainable mobility that are applicable in different social and economic contexts around the world. Overall, 22 sustainable mobility indicators have been selected and an overview of the applied measures described across the literature review has been presented.

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