Climate smart computing: A perspective

Abstract

Climate change is a societal grand challenge and many nations have signed the Paris Agreement (2015) aiming for net-zero emissions. The computing community has an opportunity to contribute significantly to addressing climate change across all its dimensions, including understanding, resilience, mitigation, and adaptation. Traditional computing methods face major challenges. For example, machine learning is overwhelmed due to non-stationarity (e.g., climate change), data paucity (e.g., rare climate events), the high cost of ground truth collection, and the need to observe natural laws (e.g., conservation of mass). This paper shares a perspective on a range of climate-smart computing challenges and opportunities based on multi-decade scholarly activities and acknowledges the broader societal debate on climate solutions. Moreover, it envisions advancements in computing methods specifically designed to tackle the challenges posed by climate change. It calls for a broad array of computer science strategies and innovations to be developed to address the multifaceted challenges of climate change.