Climate Intelligence Powered Decisioning for Enterprise Survival

Today’s fraught global conditions have created an environment where higher degrees of organizational agility equate to higher chances for survival. Key to agility is timely, actionable intelligence. This requires a robust capability to gather quality intelligence, and the ability to put it into action. An increasingly valuable and influential area of focus is climate intelligence. Gathering timely, actionable climate intelligence equips organizations to manage climate-related physical and transition risks and capitalize on climate driven opportunities that are defining the way forward for responsible growth.

Climate intelligence solutions such as sustainability risk analytics, sustainability risk intelligence, sustainability risk detection frameworks are designed to sift through massive amounts of data and mine it to generate meaningful, insightful, and actionable information. Multiple data sources and smart devices are harnessed in the effort to generate this level of operational intelligence as shown in the schematic diagram below. Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, CCTV footage, drone feeds, satellite data, geospatial data, social media feeds and news feeds are among the primary information gathering channels. Once this raw data is collected, it gets processed through information sifting by AI/ML algorithms and analytical models, before finally being presented through easy-to-understand visualization interfaces and dashboards.?

Evolving technologies such as one-shot object detection, edge computing and algorithms like sentiment analysis hold great promise for generating high-quality actionable climate intelligence. With availability of emerging and enabling technologies and solutions, reliable climate intelligence is increasingly within reach of organizations.

As an example, let’s take a simplified climate intelligence generation framework focused on gathering climate intelligence from news, wire, and social media feeds. Intelligence gathered through this basic framework can be helpful in monitoring stakeholders’ sentiments, competitors’ strategy, innovation trends as well as reputational and litigation risks to the organization as shown in the “Transition, Litigation and Reputational Risks” branch of the above schematic diagram.?Information collected by monitoring these aspects support more informed decisions and strategies to enable more effect responses to stakeholders concerns quickly and anticipate and prepare for possible transition risk disruptions. Policy changes, technological and market disruptions can all be tracked as advance indicators that climate intelligence analytics models can be trained to recognize. An example scenario in this case is ongoing adverse chatter in social media about environmental impacts of a particular facility in the local community. Picking up this trend early serves as a good barometer for reputational risks, and possibly a brewing public relations (and environmental) crisis for the organization. Averting such disasters through early detection and proactive mitigation reduces the potential for negative impact to the business.

However, gathering climate intelligence is not limited to news feeds and social media analytics, nor it is restricted to intelligence generation on climate impact parameters only. Climate intelligence data can also be sourced using emerging intelligence gathering tools and technologies. Sourcing of intelligence can be further expanded through embedded IoT sensors, drone and satellite technology for data capture.?With sophisticated AI/ML based data analytics, power and value of this information can be increased exponentially. It can also cover the trends on causal factors for the climate change, such as emission detection. This feature can be seen as the “GHG Emission and Sustainability Risk Detection” branch in above schematic diagram.?

Methane emission detection and fugitive gases linked emission detection are applications of detection capabilities enabled by specialized tools and technologies. ?State laws in USA on methane emission detection, like the one by New York state, elevate the stakes and drive the necessity of continuous monitoring of methane emissions and advance climate intelligence gathering. Exhaust pipe emission detection for automobiles is another such use of IoT generated climate intelligence application.

Beyond emissions, other critical areas for environment can also be monitored with climate intelligence, including ambient air quality, water table, flood level, and precipitation levels.???Advances in technology permit round the clock oversight and observation of threshold levels through sustainability apps that run on a wide array of industrial and personal smart devices. Like health devices, sustainability apps with the ability to gather and relay climate intelligence in a hyper-personalized manner are also being explored.

Climate intelligence for physical risk (facilities, assets, structures) is a growing area of climate action. This type of intelligence requires a multi-agency approach as a number of agencies are needed to generate climate data and models, and another set of agencies to estimate losses linked to climate associated hazards.?The “Physical Risk Solution” branch shows this aspect of climate intelligence in the above schematic diagram.

Organizations with appropriate climate intelligence frameworks and relevant solutions can become more resilient, proactive, and competitive by tackling climate event linked risks. Therefore, it is important that organizations looking for sustainable future start adopting climate intelligence technologies. They can choose to start small, say, by going for news feed and social media-based intelligence initially. In due course, the scope of data sources and technologies can be expanded as they become comfortable in using the climate intelligence productively in their decision-making process. Climate intelligent organizations’ ability to anticipate and respond to unfolding environmental uncertainty enables them to adapt better, which will help them survive and thrive in the challenging times ahead.

About Tata Consultancy Services

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for over 50 years.?TCS’ proactive stance on climate change and award-winning work with communities across the world have earned it a place in leading sustainability indices such as the MSCI Global Sustainability Index.?

TCS Intelligent Urban Exchange? (IUX) for sustainability is an enterprise software solution from TCS Digital Software & Solutions. It is an advanced AI and ML powered solution that delivers comprehensive insights, recommendations, and metrics for environmentally clean organizational and value chain operations. The aggregate system-wide impact of TCS IUX for sustainability results in substantial emissions reduction, cost savings, and resource conservation. while also advancing corporate environment stewardship, compliance, and social responsibility.?

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About the Author:

Dwarika Mishra is Head of Product Management at TCS and a specialist in sustainable operations.