The Sustainability Imperative

This Advisor explores how AI tools are transforming sustainable agriculture by integrating with traditional farming practices. Through three case studies, it highlights how farms are leveraging AI for disease detection, weather prediction, and crop management while addressing challenges such as infrastructure gaps and community skepticism. By blending technology with local knowledge, these farms demonstrate pathways to achieving climate-resilient and sustainable agricultural outcomes.

Armand Smits, an assistant professor of organizational change and design at Radboud University, the Netherlands, tackles one of the most pressing issues in digital sustainability: the rising energy and environmental cost of data centers. Digital sustainability approaches and AI rely on large amounts of data that are increasing exponentially and must be stored and processed in data centers. Smits provides a deep dive into the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP) to help managers and policymakers understand how to limit the environmental impact of data centers.

Angela Greco, assistant professor of innovation management at TU Delft, and Andrea Kerstens, a TNO scientist and PhD candidate in innovation management at TU Delft, draw on their experience with Syn.ikia, an EU-funded Innovation Living Lab for positive-energy building districts that leverage energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. Digital innovations like digital twins have been essential to unlocking positive-energy districts. For instance, digital twins that combine physical models of buildings and AI models of user behavior allow building districts to predict and optimize usage of excess solar energy. Their article presents three lessons learned from the project.

This issue of Amplify, the second in a two-part series, offers another set of insightful articles from leading researchers and practitioners working on digital innovation for climate action. The authors reiterate the core message of this Amplify series: digital innovation can accelerate climate action if managed correctly. Of course, it will lead us directly to climate disaster if used irresponsibly. Applying the carefully crafted frameworks presented in this double issue can help us avoid the latter and enable the former.

Led by Hamdy Abdelaty, a high-profile team of researchers at the Lusastia Energy Innovation Center (EIZ) at Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, shares insights about the role of digital innovation in facilitating energy innovation. The article focuses on Lusatia, a German region historically reliant on lignite (brown coal) for energy, and its ongoing transformation under Germany’s ambitious Energiewende policy, which aims for climate neutrality by 2045.

Diaa Shalghin, an emerging thought leader on building information management (BIM) in Germany and currently senior BIM manager at DEGES, teams up with Winfried Heusler of the Detmold School of Design, Germany, previously senior VP of engineering and building excellence at Schüco. The authors apply a digitally enabled, digital-first framework to explore the opportunity of enhancing lifecycle assessment through digital innovation and present three takeaways: (1) implement a digital-first sustainability strategy for improved environmental simulation and modeling through BIM; (2) leverage digitally enabled sustainability for environmental data collection and analysis through the Internet of Things; and (3) combine digitally enabled and digital-first sustainability strategies for continuous optimization through AI.

Drawing from their rich expertise in real estate, housing management, urban planning, and innovation, Brian van Laar, Angela Greco, Hilde Remøy, Vincent Gruis, and Mohammad Hamida explore the concept of adaptive reuse, which involves repurposing buildings to extend their lifespan and can drastically cut emissions in the built environment. However, implementing and scaling adaptive reuse is challenging. The decision-making process is often top-down and fails to capture relevant voices and make compromises acceptable to all stakeholders. AI might come to the rescue as it enables new visualization tools to unite stakeholders.

This Advisor builds on our previous discussion about AI’s transformative role in wildlife conservation and research. It delves into the development of AI applications and highlights key AI models such as CNNs, SVMs, and random forests. These technologies enhance efforts in species identification, habitat monitoring, and biodiversity tracking, driving global collaboration and more effective conservation strategies.