Catona Climate harnesses AI for high-quality carbon removal
Catona Climate announced that it has developed a solution that embeds carbon removal directly into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The move will expand the accessibility of its climate finance model and enable global businesses to mitigate the climate effects of AI’s energy usage with high-quality carbon removal credits.
AI holds great promise in terms of its transformative potential for climate action across many sectors — including energy, transportation, healthcare, agriculture, and forest management. AI can help track emissions with unprecedented detail and enable early detection and warning systems for natural disasters.
Catona Climate is harnessing AI to process massive datasets of bioacoustic information to help track the effects of an agroforestry project on local biodiversity. Catona is also exploring how current efforts to measure above-ground biomass and vegetation vigor with satellite imagery could be bolstered by AI and machine learning. By some estimates, scaling AI technologies could help mitigate 5 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, representing up to one-fifth of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2030 interim reduction target for the world to achieve net zero by 2050.
According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, AI training and applications could drive data center power demand to grow 160 percent by 2030, raising the amount of data center power usage to upwards of 4 percent of overall global energy consumption by the end of the decade. Innovative and proven solutions developed by companies like Catona will be critical to drive billions of dollars towards high-integrity carbon removal and ensure AI’s beneficial potential can be realised with minimal detriment to climate.
“Our challenge over the coming years will be to harness the power of AI for good while mitigating as best we can its negative climate effects,” said Catona Climate CEO Tate Mill. “Catona is uniquely positioned to help mitigate the effects of AI’s inevitable energy surge by working with leaders in the AI space to scale high-quality carbon removal projects. But we need to go beyond forward offtake agreements and – in parallel to innovating around how we accelerate global decarbonisation efforts – deploy more creative, accessible, automated climate solutions that embed carbon removal upstream into the fastest-growing, hardest-to-abate supply chains and technologies – including AI.”
But AI also represents a significant climate risk, most notably concerning the carbon-intensive amounts of computing power data centers require to run it — a risk that must be addressed head-on. AI’s sudden growth is leading tech companies at the heart of the boom to adjust emissions forecasts that feed into their net-zero pathways, raising demand for high-quality carbon removals.
Catona Climate’s carbon financing model can help meet that demand and address the impact of AI’s surging energy consumption. Leveraging its expertise and proven track record of collaborating with large technology companies, Catona will help other companies investing in AI lock in the high-quality credits they’ll need in the coming years with flexible forward offtake agreements. Additionally, these agreements create strong demand signals, which raise investor confidence driving critical capital toward the chronically underfunded nature-based carbon projects.
Now, Catona is working with upstream digital infrastructure companies to give more businesses access to the same high-quality carbon removals available through the forward offtake model. Catona’s new solution integrates climate action into underlying AI architecture and automatically addresses residual emissions with high-quality credits. Companies of all sizes will now be able to access the same carbon removal credits available to large, sophisticated enterprise buyers, providing an automated and scalable solution to mitigate the unavoidable emissions driven by AI.
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