Are we really adapting? How AI can contribute to tracking global progress
To understand what is happening in climate adaptation and to develop suitable new policies, a large-scale framework for consistently tracking climate change adaptation is urgently needed.
Efforts have been made to adjust our environments to the unavoidable impacts of climate change. At least, that is what we assume and hope. However, we currently lack clear insights into how much progress is being achieved globally in adaptation.
To accurately identify what is or isn’t occurring and to craft effective policies, establishing a comprehensive framework to monitor climate adaptation—referred to here as "adaptation"—is critical.
But how can this be accomplished when the body of climate policy evidence is enormous, unstructured, complex, and constantly growing? Additionally, expert annotation is costly and limited, and time is running out.
Countries have developed various adaptation policies and reported their actions across many documents. However, this evidence is often concealed within large amounts of vague text that also covers topics like climate change mitigation and development policy.
To make sure we know what is (and is not) happening and design appropriate new policies accordingly, the need for a large-scale framework to consistently track climate change adaptation - which I'll refer to as 'adaptation' from now on - is urgent.
Author’s summary: Tracking climate adaptation progress globally requires a unified framework, but the complexity and volume of data pose significant challenges that AI could help overcome.