The History of Planetary Intelligence

The seeds of Planetary Intelligence were planted in October 2019 during a conference session in Nice entitle "Water, The Source of Life". On stage next to Celine Cousteau, Maximilian Seunik, Piers Cumberlege, and my fellow Pi founders Alex Bertuzzi and Sarah-Louise Penhall. Sarah-Louise and I were invited to speak about the work our then startup Alchemy.ai was doing to support the Indian Government in a massive rejuvenation project for the Ganges River. Alchemy was providing predictive analytics services (early AI methodologies) to understand which interventions (solutions/investments) would have the highest impact/ROI on the health of the river, and as co-benefits to the socio-economic vitality of the Indian population. 

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It was over a casual coffee chat after the session with co-presenter Celine Cousteau where my big "climate moment" occurred. Celine was telling me about her work in the Amazon: "over 80% of the world's biodiversity is stewarded by just 4% of the global population". This statistic was the moment of enlightenment for me. As a Canadian having lived in Norway for 10 years, I understood this 4% had to be indigenous peoples. 

 

I've worked in technology my entire professional life. Data science and internet addressing systems to be specific. I love technology. I love inventing solutions with technology. I love thinking through data intelligence. Sarah and I always envisaged creating the "Deep Blue Ocean of Data" that would make visible actionable insights to improve living conditions for populations.

 

Sarah, Alex and I were compelled by the idea that "there must be a way to use AI/data science to accelerate the pace of our transition towards NetZero emissions by 2050". We decided the decade ahead was our only chance to shift economic systems inline with a possible sustainable future. As if we were the only people to have this same thought, at this very moment, ahead of the global shift in consciousness that would happen in 2020 - Covid19. We sometimes refer to this as the second "global wakeup call". Environmentalists have been working on the climate challenge for decades....

 

And so, the founders of Alchemy.ai began to pour all resources, available funds and energy into researching/understanding/identifying the 80/20 mix of climate solutions: which were the 20% of interventions on which to focus deployments that would have the 80% impact on restoring biodiversity and decarbonising the global economy.

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Alex Bertuzzi was an expert in data science, cyber security and had had a long professional track record of scaling tech start ups to global scale. Multiple exits, an IPO, Alex understood technology impact at global scale. The three, along with friends and partners including Celine Cousteau and Francois Bouche CEO of French depollution leader Valgo, hosted a conference the next month and launched a movement entitled "10 Years". The mission was to identify the key solutions and designate pilots that could be accelerated and deployed at scale with a maximum climate impact. We were so naive to think we were the only ones to come to this conclusion.

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In the following years we learned a lot. We took so many diverse paths; autonomous mining and depollution systems, methane leak detection and interventions for abandoned oil and gas wells in Canada, GIS systems in NYC to identify roofs suited to green/white painting to cool the city, and so many more test pilots. And we kept learning. We are still learning. In fact, this is the one constant for all that embark on the climate journey - it is a never ending journey of learning. It is precisely this quest for deeper understanding that makes the journey so frustrating when as tech startup veterans, searching for the "answers", we find only more questions and scope for further research.

 

The mission of Planetary Intelligence has always been to "Map the Path to Our Sustainable Future" by geo and context specific suite of interventions. And estimate/predict the projected impact on people, planet and profit. To create the "Big AI Brain of the Planet" so we can democratise access to climate solutions intelligence. For all that ask "what am I supposed to do to be sustainable?" make actions and interventions visible and actionable.

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Along the journey we have learned one truth: humanity has all of the solutions and knowledge we need to decarbonise economies and restore the natural world. This far we have identified over 20,000 solutions. But we could be mapping 10x this number annually with sufficient resources in people to go out and hunt and gather (citizen science is very powerful). The challenge is to accurately map and tag these solutions to all gie/contextual needs - for business, communities, cities, national and subnational government actors. 

Pi has had countless contributors over its 5 years of existence, volunteer, full time, part time,endless expertise from people who were driven by the outsized ambition of designing an AI platform that could match climate solutions to localised problems. 

 

The list of people who have contributed to Planetary Intelligence over the years is long, and ever growing. We are excited and deeply proud to finally be able to offer the platform to the world. We invite all of you to join us in continuing the learning and piecing together of the complex mosaic that makes up the interde[endent silos of knowledge and opportunities as we map our path towards the sustainable future we know awaits us.