2024-08-27 15:13:52
ARMONK, NY, August 26, 2024 / PRNewswire / — IBM (NYSE: IBM ) and the World Wide Fund for Nature – Germany (WWF) have announced that they will work together to explore the development of a new solution to support the monitoring of some species, starting with the endangered African forest elephant.
Combining IBM’s expertise in sustainability and technology with WWF’s extensive experience in wildlife conservation, the new solution will be designed to use AI-driven visual inspection to improve elephant monitoring by enabling accurate identification of individuals from camouflage camera photos. The goal is to support key conservation efforts for African forest elephants, which have been shown to contribute to increase carbon storage in their forest habitats.
In the future, this technology could also be used to assess the financial value of the Nature to People Contributions (NCP) that African forest elephants provide, such as carbon capture “services”, recognizing the important role they play in maintaining healthy ecosystems.
This species has experienced a reduction of more than 80% in their populations in recent years due to habitat loss and poaching in the Congo Basin. As businesses work to address climate change, supporting nature restoration plays a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
By leveraging the power of technology to track and value natural capital, organizations can explore new opportunities to contribute to climate change mitigation efforts while also identifying new sustainable financial investments.
“At IBM, we strive to make a lasting, positive impact on the world of business, our environment and the communities in which we work and live. Our collaboration with WWF is an important step in this effort. By combining our technology and sustainability expertise with WWF’s conservation expertise, we aim to harness the power of technology to create a more sustainable future,” said Oday Abbosh, global leader of Sustainability Services at IBM Consulting.
As part of this collaboration, IBM Consulting worked with WWF to explore opportunities for innovation by aligning WWF’s conservation initiatives with IBM’s sustainability and technology expertise. The software that will be used in this collaboration is IBM Maximo Visual Inspection (MVI). Leveraging its visual inspection and AI-guided modeling capabilities, the solution aims to analyze camouflage camera footage and videos to identify individual African forest elephants with greater accuracy. Currently, the use case focuses on recognizing head and tusk-related images, similar to a fingerprint for humans.
“Our technology will play a critical role in streamlining the elephant identification and accounting process. This is a promising new use case for IBM software that, combined with our consulting services and WWF’s deep understanding of the natural world, can help create new ways to accelerate organizations’ sustainability efforts,” said Kendra Dekeyrel, senior vice president of ESG and Assets Management at IBM.
Furthermore, both organizations aim to explore the IBM Environmental Intelligence to detect aboveground biomass and vegetation levels in specific areas where elephants are present, in order to help provide more accurate predictions of future elephant locations and better quantify the NCP services they provide. This will simplify the process of quantifying and valuing the carbon services provided by the African forest elephant, providing organizations with information they can use to further drive sustainability efforts.
Harnessing the power of natural capital for sustainability
IBM and WWF are committed to exploring innovative products and services to help organizations leverage natural capital to accelerate their progress toward sustainability.
The concept of natural capital refers to global reserves of natural assets, including geology, soil, air, water and all wildlife. These natural assets provide a range of ecosystem services and NCPs, which are the direct and indirect ways in which nature contributes to human well-being.
For example, a single African forest elephant roaming freely in its natural habitat can increase the net carbon capture capacity of the forest by almost 101,1 hectares. This is equivalent to eliminating one year of emissions from 2,047 cars from the atmosphere. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)this can translate to a value of up to $1.75 million per elephant, taking into account the carbon capture and other ecosystem services it provides.
“Counting African forest elephants is difficult and expensive. The logistics are complex and the resulting population figures are not accurate. Being able to identify elephants with the help of AI from camouflage camera footage could be a game-changer. With AI, we will be able to track each individual animal spatially and temporally, which will give us more robust and detailed population estimates and enable results-based conservation investments such as wildlife credit. Spatial data will also show us where these elephants decide to migrate, which will allow us to protect these wildlife wanderers,” concludes Dr. Thomas Breuer, African forest elephant coordinator at WWF Germany.
About IBM
IBM is a leading global provider of hybrid cloud and AI, and expert consulting. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs, and gain competitive advantage in their industries. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to quickly, efficiently, and securely impact their digital transformations. IBM’s advanced innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions, and consulting deliver open and flexible options for our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s historic commitment to trust, transparency, accountability, inclusion, and services. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.
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