Emerging Technologies to Tackle Climate
Change
Emerging Technologies to Tackle Climate Change
By isolating major sources of carbon emissions, researchers are racing to stop additional damage
to the planet.
By Emily Acton, Dan Wellers, Michael Rander, Fawn Fitter
The many distractions and disruptions of recent years have made it easy to lose sight of the
ongoing climate crisis, but not looking hasn’t made it disappear. Even as a global pandemic
temporarily slowed carbon emissions by keeping everyone at home, temperatures have continued
to rise. In fact, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) reports that July 2023 was
hotter than any other month in the global temperature record.
But while your attention was elsewhere, you may have missed something else: the many inventive
Emerging Technologies to Tackle Climate
ways that researchers are tackling climate change. New technologies are making it easier to
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identify emissions sources, stop further damage with greater energy efficiency and lower-carbon
alternatives to fossil fuels, and even remove excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
Want a quick overview?
Read the roundup of tools that will be used to slow or reverse climate change.
Learn more
Identifying problems
The first step toward fixing something is determining where it’s broken. We know what the
problem is: excessive carbon emissions that are raising global temperatures. But where are those
emissions coming from?
■ Pinpointing global emissions hotspots with satellites and machine learning
Climate TRACE is a Google.org-funded nonprofit that tracks and analyzes carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions from power plants, factories, controlled burns, cargo ships, and other human sources
using satellite imagery, infrared imaging, and nitrogen oxide sensors. The nonprofit intends to
analyze that information with machine learning to create a publicly accessible source of real-
time emissions data. Governments and other groups worldwide could use this data to spot
illegal polluters, verify compliance with international climate change agreements, and manage
carbon cap-and-trade markets.
■ Spotting global supply chain emissions through artificial intelligence (AI)
Businesses that produce and process oil, gas, minerals, and other raw materials are responsible
for half the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The company CarbonChain is using AI to create
“digital twins” of every piece of equipment used in heavy industry in order to model supply
chains. These models can help companies profile their current emissions and find ways to
reduce them. CarbonChain claims to be so precise that it can calculate exactly how much
carbon is generated in the processes that end with the cup of coffee on your desk.
■ Recognizing energy leaks online
A single laptop, smartphone, server, or Web site barely makes a dent in global energy
consumption. But with more than half the global population now online, the tiny bits of energy
used by our devices, the Internet, and the infrastructure that supports them add up to an
estimated 3.7% of global emissions, roughly as much as the airline industry – and that’s
expected to double by 2025. We could make our online lives more climate-friendly with tools
that help us estimate the carbon footprints of our Web sites and the emissions generated by
our energy-hungry AI and machine learning algorithms.
Emerging Technologies to Tackle Climate
Change
Stopping further climate damage
Once you know that something you’re doing is creating a problem, the next step is to do things
differently. With regard to climate change, that means developing lower-carbon energy sources
and finding more efficient ways to use the energy you generate.
Lower-carbon energy is all around us, and researchers are finding increasingly ingenious ways to
tap into it:
■ Farming seaweed for biofuel with sensor-driven drones
Plants, which absorb CO2 from the atmosphere while they grow, are also a renewable energy
source. However, the most common bioenergy sources are corn and wood, which require a lot of
land, fertilizer, and fresh water to grow. As an alternative, we could create vast seaweed farms in
distant parts of the ocean, tend and monitor them with underwater drones, and use
autonomous vessels to harvest the seaweed when it’s ready for use.
■ Solar-collecting fabric
What if you could charge your phone or laptop with the shirt on your back? A new polymer that
collects solar power can be applied to textiles, creating the possibility of shirts, pants, and other
clothing to double as mobile energy supplies.
■ Twenty-first century waterpower
Emerging Technologies to Tackle Climate
Researchers from City University of Hong Kong have developed a generator that can turn rain
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(or a leaky faucet) into energy at 140 volts a drop – enough for a single drop to briefly light up
100 small LED bulbs. Researchers in Florida are testing how well turbines that are anchored 80
feet below the ocean’s surface can capture the steady flow of the Gulf Stream. And wave energy
appears to be bouncing back from a decade of setbacks, with at least two companies planning
to introduce commercial solutions in 2021 and more not far behind.
■ Elevator generators
Power-generating brakes are familiar to anyone who drives a Toyota Prius. How about installing
them on other things that stop frequently – like elevators? The Empire State Building in New
York City did exactly that, using a technology called “regenerative braking” to capture the energy
of stopping its 68 elevators and feed that power back into the building’s infrastructure, thus
reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 40%. Imagine the impact of doing the same in every
skyscraper in every densely populated city.
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Boosting energy efficiency
To reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we also need to increase energy efficiency. Here, too, new
developments are promising:
■ Carbon fiber
Carbon fiber, the material of choice for airplanes and race cars, is super strong and super light
and can store lithium ions. That also makes it an ideal material for construction and
manufacturing – where durability and weight are critical – and for storing energy. How about an
electric car powered by its own bumpers or an easy-to-build house in which the walls are
batteries?
■ Transparent wood
Well-designed windows help moderate a building’s temperature and power use, but
conventional glass production is carbon heavy. Transparent wood, a new material made almost
entirely of fast-growing balsa trees, is a sustainable alternative that’s also five times more
thermally efficient than glass.
■ Power-saving programming
Web designers are exploring ways to reduce load time and otherwise make sites less power-
hungry and more sustainable with techniques like caching, mobile-first design, and carbon-
neutral hosting. For example, the developer of a popular custom WordPress plug-in trimmed the
code to send 20 kilobytes less data each time someone visits one of the roughly 2 million sites
that use it. In just five months, this seemingly tiny change eliminated 59,000 kilograms of
Emerging Technologies to Tackle Climate
carbon emissions, the equivalent of 85 round-trip flights between New York City and
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Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
■ Mitigating building inefficiencies through sensors and analytics
As part of a government-funded research initiative, more than 100 U.S. organizations have
reduced their energy bills by a collective US$95 million and saved the equivalent of 44,000
households’ annual power use by using sensors, meters, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to
track and manage energy use in commercial buildings. The data they gather reveals energy
waste and enables predictive analytics that identify opportunities to increase efficiency.
■ Petroleum-free plastics
Green polyurethane made from linseed oil, grease waste, or even algae – instead of petroleum –
is still in the early stages of development. But it has the potential to make any product
containing plastic, from flooring to housewares, more sustainable while also capturing CO2 –
another key area of research.
Reversing existing damage
Capturing greenhouse gases that would otherwise go into the atmosphere is a necessary aspect
of slowing climate change. Removing those gases from the atmosphere is a critical part of
undoing it. These are some breakthrough technologies with the potential for reducing the amount
of CO2 already in the air:
■ Carbon-based concrete
Concrete is a ubiquitous part of the built environment – and its production accounts for 4% to
8% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Scientists have developed a way to go green with a process
that turns CO2 from industrial exhaust into synthetic limestone, a key concrete ingredient.
■ Carbon-eating crops
Researchers are developing weeds that grow especially large, deep, sturdy roots that take a lot
of time to decompose and therefore keep carbon in the ground for decades. Gene-altering
technology like CRISPR-Cas9 would allow insertion of those genes into crops that take up more
than half of Earth’s arable land, like corn, cotton, soybean, and canola. We might then develop
Emerging Technologies to Tackle Climate
ways for farmers to document how much carbon their crops are removing from the air so they
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can be compensated with carbon credits that they can sell on the open market.
■ Carbon-sequestering fertilizer
Burning agricultural waste in a low-oxygen environment creates biochar, a charcoal-like
substance that’s not only rich in soil nutrients but also captures half the CO2 that would escape
from decomposing waste and retains most of it for up to a century. McKinsey & Company
estimates that the technology to make this scalable for the farming industry is about a decade
away.
■ Trapping carbon in rock
Most ways of capturing and storing carbon are temporary, even if long-term. In Project Vesta,
researchers are seeking ways to grind down a naturally occurring mineral called olivine into a
filter to remove CO2 from rainwater and break it down into compounds for marine organisms to
digest into shells and skeletons, which would eventually settle onto the ocean floor and form
layers of rock. This process would be inexpensive and powered by the ocean itself, and it
potentially could store trillions of tons of CO2 for millions of years.
The climate emergency remains urgent and imminent, but it also remains solvable. These are just
a few of the technological innovations giving us hope to go beyond simply averting catastrophe to
building a world that’s more livable.
From the editors: Learn more about technologies for fighting climate change in Technology for
Biodiversity Preservation; Blockchain’s Energy Crisis; and Sustainable Logistics on the Move.
Meet the Authors
Emerging Technologies to Tackle Climate
Change
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