Microsoft Corp. today outlined a new initiative that it says will advance the protection and preservation of biodiversity and ecosystems around the world.

The initiative includes a plan to develop what Microsoft calls a “Planetary Computer” that will be used to aggregate environmental data. It will also use artificial intelligence technologies to develop and deploy new systems that its partners and customers will be able to leverage to make more sustainable decisions regarding their businesses.

Microsoft President Brad Smith announced the initiative in a blog post, saying the plan is to provides its AI for Earth community with better access to environmental datasets from around the world, as well as a computing platform to analyze that information.

“We will use the Planetary Computer to develop and deploy the digital technology that helps our partners and customers with environmental decision-making in their organizational activities,” Smith said.

AI for Earth was launched in 2017 to provide organizations with AI tools and skills that can help them solve various global environmental challenges. The idea behind the project is to “harness technology to help mitigate and adapt to changing climates, ensure resilient water supplies, sustainably feed a population rapidly growing to 10 billion people, and stem the ongoing and catastrophic loss of biodiversity.”

Despite the good work done by the community so far, Smith said it needs greater access to environmental data and machine learning tools, plus the ability to share its work with others.

“Our community needs a new kind of computing platform — a Planetary Computer,” Smith said. “A platform that would provide access to trillions of datapoints collected by people and by machines, in space, in the sky, in and on the ground and in the water. One that would allow users to search by geographic location instead of keyword; where users could seamlessly go from asking a question about what environments are in their area of interest, to asking where a particular environment exists around the world.”

However, Smith said the Planetary Computer would be “incredibly complex” and that Microsoft can’t build it alone. To that end, Microsoft is expanding its partnership with a company called Esri, which sells mapping software and location intelligence services. The idea is to make key geospatial datasets available through the Microsoft Azure cloud, so they can be analyzed using Esri’s tools.

“Microsoft and Esri share the goals of making geospatial data and analysis — meaning the gathering, display, and manipulation of information about Earth systems — available to every sustainability researcher and practitioner around the world and ensuring that every conservation organization can contribute its local data back to that global repository,” Smith said.

Microsoft will also make investments in specific environmental solutions, including land cover mapping, land use optimization and species identification.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that simulating mankind’s impact on the Earth’s environment is an extremely ambitious project, but also one that’s well suited for Microsoft’s cloud capabilities.

“It’s good to see the initiative and also the humbleness at the same time, with Microsoft being honest that this will take both time and a lot of partners to fulfill,” Mueller said.

The initiative follows an announcement in January that Microsoft is planning to go carbon negative by 2030. By 2050, it anticipates that it will have removed from the environment all of the carbon its business has emitted since being founded in 1975.

Photo: Microsoft