A pair of projects that are leveraging Yale research to address the global climate threat - a game-changing forecasting system for marine carbon dioxide removal strategies and a new approach to reducing methane emissions from livestock systems - are among the winners of a worldwide competition for climate change solutions that harness the power of AI.
The two research teams will each receive $2 million over the next two years from the Bezos Earth Fund's AI Grand Challenge for Climate and Nature, in addition to a $50,000 development grant each team won earlier this year. The challenge selected 15 winners on Oct. 23.
More than 1,000 organizations entered the competition, which began last year. Of those entrants, 24 reached Phase I status in May. The projects ranged from new ways to track and protect endangered species to strategies that optimize the power grid for renewable energy integration.
The Yale-affiliated winners are a research group in the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture (YCNCC) and the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) that is building an AI-enabled model to predict the carbon removal potential of ocean interventions, and a partnership between the Alliance of Biodiversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and Purushottam Dixit of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science that is developing a "Rumen Digital Twin" that uses AI to reduce livestock methane emissions.
