Using AI for sustainability in the world's oceans

The ocean is vital to all Life on Earth and holds abundant potential to support humanity, but the ocean is under attack by overexploitation, pollution, and depletion of reserves. Cognizant Ocean is an initiative inside Cognizant that uses AI to save the oceans while growing the blue economy. The blue economy is vast; it is projected to be worth $6 trillion by 2030, and aside from the financial benefits, around four billion people have their livelihoods connected to oceans around the world.

Cognizant Ocean believes that AI and digitalization will be the driving force to solve the ocean's challenges in a sustainable way. The ocean is a vital ingredient to our longevity as a species and is in peril. The technology you need to understand the ocean on a scale is now viable in a way that hasn't been possible. Cognizant Ocean can look at the major industries using the ocean today and use our technology to help them achieve sustainable operations. The benefit of having Cognizant as a partner is that they can see other potential solutions.

This initiative is about operationalizing sustainability rather than just reporting on it. The ambition is to transfer what is learned in one industry, aquaculture, into shipping. By using AI to scale these solutions around the globe, they can have a significant impact. In the latest PTC Talk, Stig Martin Fiska, Global Head of Cognizant Ocean, spoke about growing the blue economy and saving the oceans by deploying AI.

Why is the sustainability of oceans so critical to humans?

Most discussions about sustainability and saving the planet focus on protecting the Amazon Rain Forest. However, it is surprising to learn that 80 percent of the breathable oxygen that we consume as humans is created by the oceans. The ocean also holds 90 percent of our carbon, and that is why it is heating up and getting acidic. That is why it is essential that we begin to address this problem, as we are destroying what keeps us alive. It has been over-exploited, and according to Fiska, by 2030, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

Although it is a well-recognized fact that the oceans are heating up, it is less well-known that wild fish are disappearing; it is not a finite resource. When we try to address these sustainability issues with our oceans, one of the biggest problems is that it is too vast for the human brain to grasp. Cognizant Ocean is trying to give a voice to the ocean by using AI for sustainability.

How can AI improve sustainability for oceans?

This is where AI comes to the fore by helping to manage and analyze the massive amounts of data that will be discovered and create the advanced ecosystems required. AI helps us drive the data collection, understand that data, and deliver actionable insights around the data.

One of the challenges in attempting to manage the climate in the real world rather than just the digital world is that, as humans, we have evolved to solve problems case by case. However, from a climate and ecosystem perspective, when you treat a problem in isolation, you may end up making the whole ecosystem worse. As humans, we have been ending up making the wrong choices repeatedly. Cognizant Ocean approaches the problem by trying to understand and measure the whole ecosystem, both on the business and nature side. To achieve this, Cognizant Ocean focuses on four critical areas: Blue Food, Blue Transport, Blue Life, and Blue Energy.

What are the four primary challenges facing the ocean?

In Blue Food, Cognizant Ocean is creating a holistic platform that delivers insights into the entire aquaculture value chain to recommend where, when, and how to intervene to grow food sustainably. Blue food is essential to humans because we are depleting resources while the global population is growing. Growing more sustainable protein, such as Salmon and other seafood, is vital to meet this growing need for food. One crucial fact to consider is that it takes one kilogram of feed to produce one kilogram of Salmon. It typically takes five or six times that amount of food per kilogram of beef on land.

Blue transportation is another crucial area that contributes almost three percent of climate emissions while also running the global economy. In a system as vulnerable as logistics, disruptions have considerable environmental and financial consequences; how can carriers, ports, and other actors anticipate what is coming and define mitigation actions?

Blue Life focuses on the shorelines and rivers and the biodiversity in both freshwater and saltwater. It is about restoring ecosystems and understanding what is happening there. It hopes to improve quality, biodiversity, and public health through remote sensing and machine learning.

Finally, Blue Energy looks at the effect of renewable energy and oil and gas production on the ocean ecosystem, which we do not know much about. Renewable energy is one of the critical components of the low-carbon future, but building renewable energy in the oceans will affect Life there. When you have thousands of wind turbines at sea, they take energy away from the ocean's surface and change the ocean itself. The ambition is to identify the best possible intersection between green energy and its impact on nature.

Cognizant Ocean is aware it cannot do this alone and has partnered with Tidal, who is part of the Alphabet X program. Tidal are experts at taking state-of-the-art technology and creating innovative solutions rather than simply using what is already available.

How is AI helping sustainability in the real world?

In aquaculture, they have developed an underwater autonomous robot that optimizes Salmon production in fish farms. To date, more than 800 of these robots are operating along the Norwegian coastline inside fish pens. Each pen can contain up to 200,000 Salmon, and the robots observe, and if they are hungry, they automatically start feeding. They also look after the Salmon for such things as the presence of sea lice and the integrity of the pen. Regarding fish farming, the feed is the biggest emitter of CO2 emissions at around 60 percent, so ensuring that only the appropriate amount of food is dispensed is crucial to sustainability. However, it is not just sustainability benefits; for the first time in ten years, the producers produce more fish, aided by AI projections.

Cognizant Ocean is now taking the learnings from this program and investigating how they can be applied to the modeling of the shipping industry. Shipping is a very vulnerable system, with between 70 and 80 percent of all global marine shipping interrupted daily. An example of this is that at any one time, up to 30 vessels are waiting to pass through the Panama Canal. The air travel sector has tools such as Amadeus to organize their operations, but there is nothing similar for the shipping sector. Cognizant Ocean is attempting to build a transparent system using AI that can give visibility to all maritime stakeholders and allow better cooperation.

To learn more about how Cognizant Ocean is using AI for sustainability, watch the full Talk here.