The climate change threat and the rise of ClimateGPT

Climate change is undeniably one of the most critical global challenges of our time. It has the potential to threaten human health, global security, and economic stability with permanent effect¹. The need for accurate climate analysis and data-driven policymaking has never been more important.

This is part of the inspiration behind the Endowment for Climate Intelligence (ECI), which was formed to promote scientific research and public education about climate change and its potential impacts - without the politicization seen in much of climate science. It strives to empower decision makers and researchers with accurate, balanced, and transparent information they’ll need to identify solutions to combat this threat.

ECI was founded by EQTY Lab as well as Erasmus AI, Further Ventures, ADQ Investments, and Apptek, all leaders in climate-focused investment, technology, and research, with the goal of establishing a sustainable and long-term endowment to govern climate AI models. To this end, the endowment is composed of experts in AI engineering, climate science research, as well as industry and civil society stakeholders, all dedicated to the delivery of powerful new AI tools for analyzing climate change and climate change impact in order to better inform decision makers to enact impactful change - which was the impetus for ClimateGPT. Through the ECI and with the thought leadership from EQTY Lab, ClimateGPT, an AI model specifically trained to help solve issues related to the climate crisis was born.

“ClimateGPT is the culmination of hard work, data, expertise, transparency, and collaboration to deliver a solution that can help educate and deliver insights into how best deal with the multifaceted challenge that is climate challenge”, says Ariana Fowler, Head of Research at EQTY Lab; and, ClimateGPT project lead.

EQTY lab works on creating tools to advance responsible artificial intelligence, including the use of advanced cryptography to help authenticate the entire end to end process of creating and deploying AI models. EQTY Lab saw the opportunity to revolutionize climate analysis by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models to help with the creation of ClimateGPT.

“Our goal with how we contributed to ClimateGPT was to add authenticity. We transparently document and save to a variety of distributed public ledgers exactly what went into the creation of the model and use cryptographic proofs to ensure the integrity and trustworthiness of ClimateGPT”, says Jonathan Dotan, founder of EQTY Lab.

What challenges will ClimateGPT solve?

The motivation behind ClimateGPT stems from the gravity of the climate crisis. Traditional methods of climate analysis are often slow, limited in scope, and fail to harness the full potential of the available data. In fact, climate researchers and policymakers have long faced numerous challenges when trying to bring together the vast datasets available to them related to climate change. A situation ripe for the application of artificial intelligence. And until recently, there have been no foundational models that are task specific for looking at climate change impact. These were all drivers for the creation of ClimateGPT, to provide a model that is capable of analyzing complex climate data, predict climate trends, and provide valuable insights for policy development.

From a policy standpoint, ClimateGPT expects to play a pivotal role in evidence-based policy development by providing policy makers with data-driven insights and empowering them to create climate-friendly policies that are both effective and sustainable and equitable. ClimateGPT can help them develop mitigation strategies, and create climate adaptation plans. The model's analytical capabilities will also allow for decision makers to get a deeper understanding of the potential consequences of policy decisions.

For researchers and academics, ClimateGPT significantly enhances climate research by processing the vast amounts of data collected on climate change and impacts swiftly and accurately. It aids researchers in creating more precise climate models and predictions, and developing more accurate attribution studies, all to advance our understanding of climate dynamics and what’s influencing them.

Finally, for business leaders and interests, ClimateGPT will help navigate the complex challenges presented by climate change, enabling these leaders to make informed decisions, optimize operations, and adopt responsible and sustainable business practices that can mitigate their climate impact as well as create new opportunities for innovation and growth.

How does ClimateGPT work?

ClimateGPT is intended to be intuitive and incredibly easy to use for research or policy inquiries. Users are able to submit queries to the model, which then will provide coherent and contextually appropriate responses to the query. It’s these outputs that are especially powerful. The model is not a simple one-for-one query and response experience. ClimateGPT is capable of providing responses that are based on a range of user-specified data sources. What this means is that the user can choose the response based on “focused”, “comprehensive”, and “research web” driven sources. Focused responses are derived from analysis of data that include reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Potsdam Institute, and data from other leading research organizations. Comprehensive expands to include the use of thousands of articles from academic and research contributors curated by reputation. Finally, choosing research web driven data sources allows the model to leverage data collection via an API that is configured to support a variety of additional data sources including those that are not specifically climate related. ClimateGPT will then actually go further than this.

Once a user chooses the response that is desired, they are then provided with much more in-depth answers that are organized by specific domains. These domains are Natural, Social, and Economic. Natural domain responses provide analysis that are focused within the context of the natural sciences such as ecology, oceanography, and meteorology to name a specific few. Social domain responses offer analyses that take into consideration the human impact of the response or analysis. And finally, Economic domain responses highlight the economic impact of any analyses done through the model.

“ClimateGPT provides a rapid way to retrieve high quality scientific research across all these disciplines and makes the necessary interconnections so that people can get the information they need. We have to break away from siloed thinking because climate change has a multi-dimensional impact on the world, so we need holistic solutions that can address this”, says Dotan.

Another important capability is that for any response provided, regardless of domain, attribution is provided. All of the resources that were used to provide the output are clearly attributed. This serves two important purposes: it gives the user a full understanding of the reference data used for analysis; and it provides maximum transparency into the analysis process, from data ingestion, data preparation, model training, model inference, to how outputs are formulated.

ClimateGPT is a very powerful tool that ensures that policy makers, business leaders, and researchers are provided with the most comprehensive and in-depth responses to their climate related queries.

Why Hedera in the fight against climate change?

First, there is a high level of alignment with the values of EQTY Lab, the ECI, and its supporting organizations and those of Hedera. The shared sense of commitment to sustainability being one that is foundational. In fact, per Ariana Fowler, “Hedera is a great example of how distributed ledger technology can be a force for good in the fight against climate change. They have been a pioneer in efficiency of DLT technology and their commitment to sustainability is not just a talking point; it's embedded in their core values and driving their innovation.”

Second, EQTY Lab and the ECI believe that enterprise awareness and participation is going to be critical for the goals of the ECI, and the Hedera network has been built from the ground up to support the needs of the modern enterprise including bank-grade security, reliability, low transaction costs, and the ability to support transaction volumes at massive scale with finality of transactions in seconds.

Finally, EQTY Lab leverages the Hedera consensus service to save, on ledger, each step-in model training, tuning, and compute processes as well as any transactions taking place through the ClimateGPT model. Hedera’s fair ordering allows visibility into how these processes unfold over time. This has been critically important for being able to provide the utmost transparency into how ClimateGPT functions. This is invaluable for solidifying the trust of the work that the model is doing and the outputs and analysis it provides and lets ClimateGPT differ from other cryptographic solutions.

“Hedera provides us a way to create an immutable and distributed record of the workflows for ClimateGPT and create a public anchor to the network, which is a very powerful thing to do” says Fowler of EQTY Lab.

By launching ClimateGPT, EQTY Lab and the ECI truly plan to change the world and do their part to help educate and inform the public, leaders, and decision makers – and stop climate change. This is something that Hedera is very proud to be a part of.