Sector: Environment

Problem: We are in an environmental crisis. We are losing 15 billion trees each year. We lost 1.3M sq Kms of forest cover.

Solution: Hara Bhara, India’s first aerial seeding campaign in Telangana using the Seedcopter drone. The idea of the campaign is to accelerate the mission of reforestation by planting one billion trees using drones by 2030 in the country.

Problem: Climate extremes will become more often as the climate warms and becomes more variable. As a result, natural hazards such as drought will change in magnitude, frequency, duration, and spatial extent. Drought is a creeping phenomenon that is difficult to identify and describe due to variances in hydro-meteorological variables, socioeconomic considerations, and the unpredictability of water demand in different parts of the world. Farmers must therefore grasp the current state of their land. They can use a variety of strategies to minimize yield losses caused by droughts, depending on the severity of the circumstance. As a result, they require a solution to address these issues.

Solution: Drought has a direct impact on Indian agriculture by reducing crop, vegetable, and fruit production. Farmers’ income is drastically reduced as a result of this. The issue worsens if the drought continues and groundwater availability for irrigation decreases. Furthermore, the effects of drought on animals result in livestock mortality. HelioPas AI is a German firm that offers solutions to help farmers deal with droughts more effectively, to teach farmers about drought insurance plans, the business leverages field data and actuarial analytics.

Problem: AI Robot that segregates 5 Tonnes of Waste in an Hour
The effects of climate change have begun to show up across the world in various forms of destruction – wildfires due to excessive heat, cyclones, heat waves, and unseasonal rains that ruin crops etc. Waste and refuse are one of the biggest sources of water and land pollution. Waste sorting in India is currently mostly done by humans. The process is not only unhygienic and tedious, but also dangerous for human beings.
The problem statement aims at providing an automated process for sorting out waste.
Solution: Named as ‘Sanjivani’, artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML) an IoT-enabled device automatically sorts or segregates waste that can be recycled.12

The solution uses Netra AI Vision system which is a self-learning computer that comes with industrial cameras, sensors, and neural networks that learn about waste by grabbing images and detecting recyclables on the conveyors.

The platform is already trained with more than two million images.

Problem: How AI & IoT provides environmental data to combat air pollution The air quality index in most Indian cities, especially New Delhi, Ahmadabad, Mumbai as well as Pune, is above the government’s indicated healthy range. Despite these alarming statistics and facts, there is little being done to combat pollution and solve this crisis. There is hardly any reliable data for a common man to understand and gauge the quality of air in his/her immediate surroundings, hence there is a need of a platform that creates awareness amongst the people regarding the air quality around them along with the ways to improve the air quality.
Solution: Ambee is an environmental intelligence startup that measures, processes and analyses hyperlocal air quality data in real time.
Using AI and IoT, Ambee provides location specific, real time environmental data and actionable insights to businesses and consumers to mitigate the effects of various threats from environmental factors, for example air pollution.
An in-house training model with years of data to utilize parameters, such as weather and temperature, wind speed, the direction of the wind, population density, etc. 
Air sensors and multiple satellite stations to measure air quality.

Problem: One of the biggest burgeoning climate threats today is thawing permafrost. Mainly found in polar regions like the Canadian Arctic, permafrost is composed of ice, rock and sediment located under a layer of soil. As much as 70 percent of permafrost could melt by 2100, releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Climate change-induced permafrost thaw also causes landslides and erosion that threaten communities and critical infrastructure. The problem statement aims at providing a solution to detect these permafrost regions in the Arctic region
Solution: Start-up 3vGeomatics is using a remote sensing radar satellite-based technology called InSAR to monitor thawing permafrost across the Canadian Arctic.

Conducting analyses via an on-premises server with NVIDIA data centre GPUs enables thousand-fold increase in processing speed of the radar satellite images, each of which contains billions of pixels and covers thousands of square kilometers. Through InSAR monitoring of built structures, it is possible to identify movement in specific parts of a building as well as specific areas within a network of buildings across a property.

Problem: More than one million species are at risk of extinction, globally. Without precise information on where those species are likely to be found, conservationists struggle to prioritize their efforts. Regulations for protecting endangered species inhibit agriculture, housing, and infrastructure development in areas where there is uncertainty about the presence of at-risk species. The problem statement aims to protect imperiled species through the means of Artificial Intelligence.
Solution: NatureServe is leveraging Esri ArcGIS tools and Microsoft cloud computing to generate high-resolution habitat maps for imperiled species – providing critical information for smart conservation action.

Biologists in the NatureServe Network collect field data on at-risk species, which is combined with satellite imagery and other environmental data.

Spatial modelers run machine learning to generate predictive maps of species habitat. Web apps support collaborative review by experts.

Problem: he Pollution Control Board (PCB) data revealed that although Rs 4000 crore had been spent on the Clean-up Ganga Plan, the level of pollution in the river has increased. In 2017, Ganga made it to the list of the most polluted rivers in the world.
The problem statement aims at providing a solution to clean up the holy river Ganga
Solution: As part of the nation-wide initiative, National Mission Clean Ganga campaign, the Government has already collaborated with IIT Kanpur to expand the data collection footprint through data mining.

Researchers at IIT Kanpur are deploying GIS mapping technology to map and combat pollution levels in the River Ganga

Problem: Arsenic has been a menace in Eastern India especially along the banks of the Ganga for almost two decades now, putting millions of people at severe health risk.
The problem statement aims at providing a probabilistic model to study the distribution patterns of the contaminated groundwater for years to develop a large-scale ecological and environmental framework addressing this challenge in the region.
Solution: A group of researchers from IIT Kharagpur has successfully predicted the distribution of groundwater arsenic and human health risk in the affected areas using AI algorithms on environmental and geological and human usage parameters.
The researchers have delineated the high and low arsenic zones across the entire delta using artificial intelligence and quantify the number of people exposed.
They have developed probabilistic models of arsenic occurrence, exposure and human health risk assessment within the delta region.

Problem: Based on the best available information, tiger populations are stable or increasing in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Russia and China. An estimated 3,900 tigers remain in the wild, but much more work is needed to protect this species if we are to secure its future in the wild. In some areas, including much of Southeast Asia, tigers are still in crisis and declining in number.1

Currently the tiger reserves carry out law enforcement and ecological monitoring activities at regular interval, but the information generated is ad hoc and is rarely available to the tiger reserve managers in a format for informed decision making in an adaptive management framework. The “M-STrIPES” has been designed to addresses this void. It is a platform where modern technology is used to assist effective patrolling, assess ecological status and mitigate human-wildlife conflict in and around tiger reserves.2
Solution: Project M-STrIPES integrates GIS technologies with technological insights from key states that have tiger populations.

This enables the study of the spatial coverage of forest patrols by producing reports and maps that synthesize information on illegal activities, wildlife crime, protection efforts, and ecological status.

Problem: Flooding is the most common natural disaster on the planet, affecting hundreds of millions of people and causing between 6,000 and 18,000 fatalities every year – of which 20 percent are in India.
Flooding is a severe aspect that has destroyed several housing and other valuable assets, hence there is a need for a platform that can warn of the upcoming floods so that necessary actions can be taken to prevent damage.
Solution: To simulate the water behaviour across a floodplain, inundation modelling uses as inputs measurement or forecast of river water levels and high-resolution elevation maps.
Real-time river measurements and forecasts are obtained for this initiative through Google’s collaboration with the Central Water Commission (CWC), the technical organization of India in the field of water resources.
Google has devised a new approach for inundation modelling, called a morphological inundation model, which combines physics-based modelling with ML to create more accurate and scalable inundation models in real-world settings