Sixteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Computing research can play a role in mitigation, adaptation, and resilience in response to the existential threat of climate change. This goes far beyond the well-known predictive power of climate models. Computing researchers can develop and deploy smart sensor networks for monitoring drought, wildfire, and other salient variables and processes. AI can be used to develop new materials for renewables, or new crop variants that accommodate climate change. Computer algorithms can plan smart crop-rotation strategies that adapt to changing conditions, or optimize the spatial distribution of a crop along a wet-dry gradient to make production robust in the face of precipitation variations. Similar algorithms can predict how essential systems, like supply chains and electric grids, will react to extreme events—and use that information to plan a response (e.g., rolling blackouts to protect a power grid). Crafted properly, these algorithms can produce a full accounting of the hidden and downstream costs, including those to individuals, as well as to society, the environment, and the economy. This is a direct contribution to equity and climate justice. Bringing this type of expertise into the global, interdisciplinary climate-change community could be transformative. Purpose-driven organizations like the Computing Research Association (cra.org/ccc) can serve as effective points of contact for this effort. Of course, computing itself contributes to the climate emergency. The data/compute centers that support the Cloud, for example, now have a larger carbon footprint than the entire airline industry. Accordingly, there is a strong need for computing research to mitigate its own impact.