Shanghai, China--(Newsfile Corp. - July 7, 2022) - Frost & Sullivan participated in the "Tech for the better planet" online summit hosted by Huawei and supported by IUCN on June 6th, 2022. In the online summit, the speakers from IUCN, Huawei, and partners from projects in Europe, Asia and Africa shared their thoughts and experiences on how digital technologies can contribute to climate action and biodiversity conservation. From their speaking and experiences, people can fully realize the serious impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss. However, under the leadership of high-tech companies like Huawei, the environmental problems can be effectively solved with the digital technologies, especially the challenges to biodiversity conservation.
Frost & Sullivan
The importance of climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation
Climate change and biodiversity loss can have enormous implications for human living. As for climate, climate change has the potential to increase the frequency of natural disasters, damage natural ecosystems and human-built infrastructures and so on. Because of the importance of climate, climate change has become a global agenda since the late 1980s, but it does not necessarily mean that collective response strategies that are effective and efficient have been introduced. Currently, with the development of technology, digital technologies can mitigate climate change more effectively.
Biodiversity conservation is also important in human living. Human health ultimately depends upon ecosystem products and services (such as availability of fresh water, food and fuel sources) which are requisite for good human health and productive livelihoods. Biodiversity loss can have significant direct human health impacts if ecosystem services are no longer adequate to meet social needs. Additionally, biological diversity of microorganisms, flora and fauna provides extensive benefits for biological, health, and pharmacological sciences. Significant medical and pharmacological discoveries are made through greater understanding of the Earth's biodiversity. Loss in biodiversity may limit discovery of potential treatments for many diseases and health problems.
There are some ways to help biodiversity conservation, such as establish a gene bank, draw up related laws and build area-based conservation. In view of expanding human land use, increasing climate change and unmet conservation targets, area-based conservation requires efficiency and effectiveness more than ever. However, protected area management often lacks the continuous availability of data on current states and trends of nature and threats. Because of that, a few illegal activities like illegal harvesting of species and damaging towards protected habitats are widespread. Some digital technologies can be applied to the prevention of illegal activities against nature. For instance, real time devices can record the sounds of nature and transmits real time through cloud platform, which analyzes data. The artificial intelligence system allows to detect sounds, possibly associated with illegal activities towards a given species or habitat and it can alert protectors. Moreover, adaptive management is an auspicious concept in the framework of systematic conservation planning to ensure the enduring effectiveness of protected areas despite unpredictable future developments. Post-2020 international biodiversity and sustainable development goals could be met earlier if protected areas were more effective. Consequently, it needs an information system that is to support area-based conservation by synthesizing challenges and opportunities for protected area management effectiveness and efficiency at the local to global level. And digital technologies will play an essential role in biodiversity conservation, because it can be applied to build an information system.
Digital technology: enabler for environment protection
Digital technology is an enabler of the environmental protection, to mitigate climate change and conserve biodiversity. Digital technologies have a particular influence on the evolution of traditional ideas about the methods of environmental protection. Many environmental problems caused by the globalization era can hardly be resolved without using digital technologies (for example, in terms of overcoming the consequences of global climate change and biodiversity conservation). Further development of digital technologies will reduce the consumption of hydrocarbons and greenhouse gas emissions, help to mitigate the consequences of the emergence of electronic waste. In terms of biodiversity conservation, In-situ monitoring techniques, remote sensing and open data infrastructures can fill data and information gaps for protected area planning and management. Also, open-source technology can be used to promote the mainstream of biodiversity conservation. Environmental organizations can build positive feedback on species data and AI training sets to promote the biodiversity conservation in the spirit of open source by working with ICT sector.
Nowadays, digital technologies are mainly used in climate change mitigation, such as accelerating PV to be main power, promoting digitalization of traditional energy to improve efficiency of energy production and improving the energy efficiency of ICT. And the applications of digital technologies in biodiversity conservation are related immature, such as real-time data transmission and AI-powered platform. In the future, with people getting more information on biodiversity and the technologies getting more developed, the digital technologies will be used in conserving biodiversity more frequently and maturely.
Huawei's direction and achievements in enabling technology
Huawei is committed to continue its innovation in the direction of digitalization, intelligence and low-carbonization and specifically Huawei spared no effort to use digital technology in climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation.
In terms of climate change mitigation, Huawei promotes green development in industries through ICT innovations that support the global zero-carbon journey. On the energy supply side, the company has integrated power electronics and digital technologies to accelerate the development of renewable energy. In terms of energy use, Huawei will continue to innovate energy-saving technologies to continuously improve the energy efficiency of ICT infrastructure, in turn saving energy and reducing emissions in industries. For example, Huawei helped the customer build the world's largest single PV power plant in Qinghai. By using cloud and AI technologies, the PV power plant increased energy yield by more than 2% and O&M efficiency by more than 50%. Also, it reduced carbon emissions by 2.38 million tons each year. Besides, in the HUAWEI CLOUD Guian data center, the company uses innovative technologies, such as liquid cooling, prefabricated modules, and cluster computing to improve energy efficiency by 5% to 8% as well as reduce carbon emissions by 810 thousand tons per year with 1 million servers running at full capacity.
As for the aspect of biodiversity conservation, Huawei is committed to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of biodiversity conservation through terminal, network, and cloud and deals with a lot of difficulties of biodiversity conservation. On the data collection side, infrared cameras and acoustic collection devices are used to collect data such as sound, pictures, and videos of the ecosystem. On data transmission side, data are transmitted to the data center or cloud in real time in the wireless or wired mode. In terms of data storage and data analysis, technologies such as cloud and AI are used to efficiently store and intelligently analyze data.
There are many successful cases in biodiversity conservation by Huawei. For example, in collaboration with WWF and other partners in Italy, Huawei has deployed acoustic monitoring devices in 12 oases that can identify sounds such as shotguns and motorbike engines and send warnings to rangers. Currently, the project has recorded more than 300 thousand clips and warned of more than 1000 potentially illegal activities. It shows that acoustic monitoring systems can play an important role in identifying illegal behavior in wetland ecosystems.
In addition, since 2020, Huawei has worked with IUCN to launch the Tech4Nature project globally and piloted it in Switzerland, Spain, China, Mexico, and Mauritius. Among them, in Mauritius, Huawei supports the partners to deploy the first real-time underwater coral reef monitoring system in the Indian Ocean. Underwater cameras, LTE networks, and AI technologies enable real-time observation for at least 8 hours a day, and nearly 10 thousand corals have been planted. In the North of Norway, to protect local salmon ecosystems, Huawei supports the partners to deploy AI technology to identify different types of salmons, with over 90% recognition rate.
The advocation of fair market by Frost & Sullivan
Climate change and biodiversity loss are common crises faced by humanity. As climate change and biodiversity loss increase and as the digital economy continues to grow in demand for energy, more and more people need to recognize that the planet is humans' only home and people must protect its limited resources. The leading company like Huawei did well in using innovative technologies to reduce carbon emissions and conserve biodiversity. If the application of technological innovation results could be handled jointly by the whole society and no barriers were set up, the only Earth can be better protected. Therefore, Frost & Sullivan advocates that all sectors of society should work together within an open and collaborative market environment to apply technological innovations to industries and transform new technologies into solutions and services that can help build a green planet.
Media contact
Contact: Rachel Zhang
Company Name: Frost & Sullivan
Website: http://www.frostchina.com
Email: rachel.zhang@frostchina.com
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