Last summer, as the COVID-19 pandemic settled into a state of relative control, Google.org turned its attention to an even larger and more complex global emergency: climate change. The corporate philanthropy’s 2022 Impact Challenge on Climate Innovation — the latest in its decade-long series of Impact Challenges on various topics — committed $30 million to support “big bet” projects that accelerate technological innovation in climate information and action. Google.org would back six projects at up to $5 million each, for up to three years. Projects that make use artificial intelligence technology were encouraged — the effort aims to understand what’s going on in a changing planet and develop tools to help communities adapt to and minimize harmful and disruptive impacts.
More recently, Google.org has begun announcing the challenge’s awardees, which so far include the World Wildlife Fund, the Woodwell Climate Research Center and the World Resources Institute. They’re all projects that leverage AI to crunch large and disparate sets of data that scientists hope will provide inside into the extremely complex processes of nature. The work is wide-ranging — a research program to study mangrove trees in coastal areas, a study of permafrost in Alaska, and research to understand the extreme heat conditions that increasingly affect and threaten people worldwide, particularly in cities.
“We set out to look for large-scale, ambitious projects that were using technology, and we called out AI as, obviously, a technology that we had seen drive impact,” said Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, director of product impact at Google.org. “[These projects] are examples of the ability of AI to help us understand, create and analyze new data that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.”
The 2022 Impact Challenge on Climate Innovation is one of a series of annual Impact Challenges hosted by Google.org going back a decade, each aimed at nonprofits and social enterprises that are tackling specific problems, such as climate change, or to support positive change in particular communities or regions. Funding levels have varied with the individual challenges over the years. Google.org has run Impact Challenges for the nation of Kenya, the city of Pittsburgh and the San Francisco Bay Area, and it has also run other challenges for climate-related action. Here’s a look at some of the work getting support through this Impact Challenge so far, and why this funding represents a return to form for a technology funder that pivoted hard to COVID response over the past several years.
AI for mangroves
One challenge awardee, the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), will receive a $5 million grant over three years to support ManglarIA (Spanish for “AI for Mangroves”), a project with research and community partners in Mexico designed to understand mangrove tree ecosystems. Mangroves grow in warm coastal areas around the world, and are important players in nature for several reasons, including carbon sequestration, biodiversity and as animal habitats, and to mitigate coastal erosion. Not surprisingly, mangroves are also at risk from climate change and rising seas, as well as from construction and development.
“We just don’t understand enough about how climate is affecting ecosystems like mangroves,” said Shaun Martin, WWF’s vice president of adaptation and resilience and deputy lead for climate change. “What we’re trying to do is find the critical thresholds or patterns in how climate and extreme weather events are affecting them.”
The ManglarIA project will, among other things, use AI to integrate data from observations, weather and climate. “There’s no way a human could marry the datasets to figure out the relationships between weather and climate and ecosystem health,” Martin said. “That wasn’t really a problem as long as the climate was stable because ecosystems have adapted to the climate that we used to have. Now, that that’s changing. We’re in uncharted territory.” Armed with better understanding, he went on, the WWF believes it will be better able to make and recommend informed, climate-smart conservation decisions.
Tracking Arctic permafrost
Another $5 million Impact Challenge grant went to the Woodwell Climate Research Center, which conducts research at the nexus of climate, people and nature. The grant will support a new project in Alaska that will use satellite data and AI technology to develop a first-of-its-kind, open-access resource to track Arctic permafrost thaw in near real time. Permafrost, like mangrove trees, is important for several reasons: A major one is that it stores large amounts of carbon, which is being released into the atmosphere in increasing quantities as the climate warms and more of the permafrost thaws. That added carbon release then fuels additional warming.
But the melting permafrost is having an even more immediate impact on people who live in Alaska, who have built homes and other infrastructure on ground that is no longer stable. Making matters more complicated, not all areas of permafrost are alike — some permafrost is “ice-rich,” and thus more likely to degrade into a soupy mess when it thaws.
“If you have a road or a building and you start degrading the top part of the permafrost, the ground is going to subside — but it doesn’t subside evenly,” said Anna Liljedahl, associate scientist at Woodwell. As a result, many houses are increasingly unsafe and under threat of damage. “There are entire villages that are considering relocating to stay away from this type of hazard.”
The Woodwell project will track and combine data on weather, climate, geography and other factors to understand what’s going on in the permafrost. The idea is that AI functionality will enable a much faster analysis than had been previously possible. “This way, we don’t have to wait 10 years to see what happened 10 years ago. We can look at what happened last month,” Liljedahl said. These more rapid insights promise to help residents of permafrost regions prepare for the short term and adapt for the long term.
In addition to the grant, Google.org will support the permafrost project through its Google.org Fellowship, a program that lets Google employees devote their technical expertise full-time, pro bono, for up to six months, to aid projects at nonprofits and other entities.
In addition to WWF and Woodwell, the World Resources Institute also received an Impact Challenge grant to develop tools to help people cope with extreme heat — increasingly familiar to many across the U.S. and around the world, particularly in urban areas. Other Impact Challenge grantees will be announced in the coming weeks.
These Google.org grants come as AI increasingly becomes a lightning rod, the object both of optimism for its potential benefits, and legitimate concern about its potential risks and undesirable impacts on society. As we’ve discussed previously, philanthropic funders have responded from both directions, with some continuing and expanding their backing of research to drive the use of AI, while others seek to ensure the technology’s safe and ethical use.
A post-pandemic pivot
Meanwhile, Google.org’s Impact Challenge on Climate — it’s not the first time the philanthropy has funded climate work, by the way — represents something of a return to form. When the pandemic hit, Google.org had shifted substantial focus and resources to response funding. “Like many in the philanthropy world, we obviously pivoted a lot of our emphasis toward COVID during the time that it felt like the emergency that it was,” Gosselink said. “We’re not emphasizing COVID as much in our funding right now.” Rather, the organization has returned to one of its core concerns: the use of advanced technology to tackle big challenges, as with this Impact Challenge on Climate, and advancing economic opportunity, particularly in the digital economy.
Google.org says it grants out about $200 million per year to support its causes of focus, including economic empowerment, technology and innovation, learning and other initiatives. As mentioned, the funder devoted considerable resources to COVID-19 response from 2020 to 2022. For more information, see IP’s Google.org profile.
