In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) summarized that in order for the global average temperature to remain within 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels, the annual amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere needs to be drastically reduced by 2050 at the latest. Failure to stay within 1.5° C levels poses large risks for the sustainability of human and environmental systems stemming from an increased risk of global temperature extremes, heavy precipitation events, extreme droughts, forest fires, and many other factors. These increased risk factors can lead to an exacerbation of global poverty, loss of biodiversity, and a general degradation of the natural environment (IPCC, 2014).

As discussed in our introduction section documents, domain experts have identified the following sectors of industry that currently contribute most of the global greenhouse gas emissions each year: electricity systems, transportation, buildings, industry, and farming and forestry. An increased focus on technological innovation is needed in order to achieve dramatic and timely reductions in the amount of greenhouse emissions produced by each of these sectors. Within each of these sectors, industry experts have furthermore identified a series of key bottlenecks where analytics solutions can and have been able to deliver maximal impact to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. In this collection, we highlight some of these recent analytics developments that have brought impactful contributions to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions within each of these sectors in four sections. For a more in-depth and complete coverage of each of these key impact areas, we encourage the readers of our collection to browse through the literature reviews in our introduction section.

In addition to an increased focus on technological innovation, strong collaboration between researchers, policy makers, and corporations is needed to ensure that technological efficiency gains in each of these sectors actually lead to a net reduction of total greenhouse gas emissions, rather than an increase. For instance, under some incentive structures, technological innovations that lead to reduced greenhouse gas emissions from non-renewable forms of energy can actually increase the net amount emitted by making these forms of energy cheaper to emit. As such, researchers in this area should strive to evaluate their technological solutions while trying to incorporate broader policy and corporate investment strategies into their analysis. Thus, in our integrative climate change mitigation strategies section we include a set of recent analytics solutions that incorporate public policy and corporate strategy into the overall goal of climate change mitigation.

Finally, the development of accurate climate models and the development of carbon dioxide removal technology have been identified as other key areas in which the field of analytics and operations research can deliver high-impact solutions to the goal of climate change mitigation. Thus, we include recent analytics solutions of this nature into our integrative climate change mitigation strategies section.

Sections

1. Introduction
2. Electricity Systems
3. Transportation
4. Buildings, Cities, and Industry
5. Farms and Forests
6. Integrative Climate Change Mitigation Strategies

References

IPCC, 2014: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Edenhofer, O., R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, A. Adler, I. Baum, S. Brunner, P. Eickemeier, B. Kriemann, J. Savolainen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow, T. Zwickel and J.C. Minx (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning

David Rolnick, Priya L. Donti, Lynn H. Kaack, Kelly Kochanski, Alexandre Lacoste, Kris Sankaran, Andrew Slavin Ross, Nikola Milojevic-Dupont, Natasha Jaques, Anna Waldman-Brown, Alexandra Luccioni, Tegan Maharaj, Evan D. Sherwin, S. Karthik Mukkavilli, Konrad P. Kording, Carla Gomes, Andrew Y. Ng, Demis Hassabis, John C. Platt, Felix Creutzig, Jennifer Chayes, Yoshua Bengio

Published Online: November 5, 2019