IBM’s VP and Global Head of ESG Jonah Smith on AI and ESG
IBM is a titan in the global technology landscape.
However, this stature does not come at the expense of sustainability — in fact, it drives IBM’s commitment to it.
The company harnesses its extensive resources and influence to operate sustainably while empowering its clients, customers and partners to adopt similar practices.
Jonah Smith serves as IBM's Vice President and Global Head of Environmental Social Governance, playing a pivotal role in advancing IBM's sustainability agenda through initiatives such as the IBM Sustainability Accelerator.
Here, Jonah delves into the nuances of the accelerator program, illustrating how IBM employs artificial intelligence to foster sustainability and environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts.
He also shares insights on how other tech-focused enterprises can emulate IBM's sustainable practices.
Q. Please introduce yourself and your role
I’m Jonah Smith, IBM Vice President and Global Head of Environmental Social Governance. In my role, I lead global ESG stakeholder engagement, strategy, goals, reporting and governance.
I’m also responsible for the development and implementation of IBM social innovation programmes, such as the IBM Sustainability Accelerator.
Q. In your own words, what is IBM and how does it contribute to the energy and climate tech spaces?
IBM is a 113 year-old company and current leading provider of global hybrid cloud, AI and consulting expertise, with a strong legacy of innovation and purpose to help make the world work better.
One of the three main pillars of our ESG strategy is Environmental Impact. In terms of our own operational footprint related to climate and energy, a couple of significant things we’re doing include that we’re ahead of target on our greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals, while also procuring about 70% renewable energy as of the end of 2023.
We also offer various products and services and consulting focused on energy efficiency and climate mitigation. As you can see, this is an important area for us and more broadly we aim to create better pathways to conserve natural resources, reduce pollution and minimise climate-related risks, using the power of technology.
Q. Give me an overview of the IBM Sustainability Accelerator.
The IBM Sustainability Accelerator is a pro bono social impact programme applying IBM technologies like hybrid cloud and IBM watsonx AI, and our ecosystem of experts, to projects with non-profits and governments around the world, supporting communities especially vulnerable to environmental challenges.
We work with each organisation for two years and introduce a new topic and cohort of organisations annually. We’ve launched cohorts on sustainable agriculture, clean energy and water management, and next will be resilient cities.
The programme’s second cohort is focused on clean energy. According to UNDP, 1 in 10 people in the world do not have access to electricity. Technologies like AI can truly enable policymakers and communities to make data-driven decisions that promote clean energy access and support a just transition.
By working in partnership, we bring together the best expertise to solve energy issues, both local and global.
Q. How does IBM plan to leverage its AI and cloud technologies to address urban resilience challenges?
At the beginning of 2024, IBM held an RFP to select our next cohort of IBM Sustainability Accelerator projects, focused on resilient cities, and we’re looking forward to launching our next cohort.
One reason IBM selected this topic is because of the many ways that technology can contribute to more sustainable urban development, helping address the complex challenges our cities face today.
With the power of AI, we have the opportunity to generate useful insights that better equip cities to respond to climate challenges. We’re already exploring some applications in our existing cohorts, but here are a few other possible examples.
Foundation models and geospatial analytics could enable us to visualise how climate change will impact cities respective to urban population changes, the ecosystem, biodiversity or modeling weather patterns, for example.
Moreover, we can use this information to help improve planning or response and readiness during extreme weather events, as well as leverage it with technology that helps us execute environmental initiatives and helps mitigate against detrimental climate impacts.
Q. Are there any specific outcomes or impacts you hope the Sustainability Accelerator will achieve?
The IBM Sustainability Accelerator is designed to target specific populations and communities especially vulnerable to environmental challenges.
According to the World Bank, climate-related disasters and natural hazards push 26 million people into poverty each year.
Meanwhile, about one in 10 people worldwide do not have access to electricity, according to UNDP.
The World Health Organization and UNICEF say the lack of consistent access to clean water is a major problem for two billion people that live in countries experiencing intense water stress.
Because of this, each cohort focuses on specific outcomes. For example, the aim of our first cohort is to help smallholder farmers make agriculture more sustainable, helping increase productivity and income. Additionally, our clean energy cohort projects aim to help communities address clean energy and energy planning issues such as electricity access, energy usage and energy transition.
Ultimately, the challenges communities face worsen without appropriate investment, technical skills, access to energy or tools to manage and understand data.
By uniting experts and technology to confront these challenges, we have the potential to make lasting, scalable impact while empowering communities exposed to environmental threats.
Q. Can you share some success stories or measurable impacts from the previous cohorts?
To date, we’re proud that IBM has supported more than 65,000 direct beneficiaries through the IBM Sustainability Accelerator. We currently have projects on every continent except Antarctica and the programme continues to grow each year.
One success story that stands out to me is through our project with the organisation Sustainable Energy for All. An AI-powered platform we developed is already being implemented for energy planning in Kenya.
Based on information from this platform, Makueni County in Kenya obtained valuable insights to implement measures that are projected to benefit around 1.1 million people by 2030.
At IBM, we’re also increasing our investment in the programme. In 2024, IBM announced a commitment to invest US$45m in cash and in-kind donations of technology and services through the IBM Sustainability Accelerator through the end of 2028.
Since 2021, we’ve invested more than US$11m in-kind and cash towards the IBM Sustainability Accelerator.
Q. Beyond the Sustainability Accelerator, how is IBM integrating ESG considerations into its broader corporate strategy and product development?
At IBM, ESG is integrated into our business model through the framework we created called, IBM Impact.
It’s composed of three pillars, Environmental Impact, Equitable Impact and Ethical Impact, and represents a unified comprehensive approach in how we demonstrate progress against our ESG goals and share this with the world.
The framework is aligned with business priorities, so all material aspects are relevant to our corporate strategy and stakeholders.
We have instituted an ESG SteerCo and ESG Subcommittees as part of IBM’s working governance on ESG.
Beyond that, we work to embed sustainability in how we design and build products and services across IBM.
From hybrid cloud offerings to our iconic servers, from a robust legacy and continuing emphasis on research and development, and comprehensive sustainability consulting practices, IBM’s purpose is to make the world work better. That includes ESG and sustainability.
Internally we often talk about IBM as ‘client zero’. We embed our own sustainability-focused technologies — such as AI and our Environmental Intelligence Suite — directly into IBM. We then take those learnings back to our clients and help them implement and operationalise sustainability.
At the center of IBM’s responsible technology efforts is our AI Ethics Board. Members of the Board work to infuse IBM's principles into business and product decision-making.
Q. Speaking more broadly, what role do you see AI and ML playing in accelerating the transition to clean energy and improving climate resilience?
There are many applications of AI technology that can help accelerate clean energy while simultaneously supporting communities and unlock resilience in the face of climate challenges.
Through the IBM Sustainability Accelerator, we’ve seen examples of how this can work across different countries, communities and pressing sustainability and social topics.
We’ve worked with organisations like United Nations Development Programme and Sustainable Energy for All to develop brand-new AI models and applications.
These mechanisms can provide essential energy and weather-related information to leaders and policymakers that equips communities with critical systems and tools to help transition to clean energy or combat climate change in very localized and specific ways — and we make this available for free to the general public as well.
Putting AI technology directly into the hands of communities who need it most is an important part of supporting a just energy transition and ensuring that technology has the greatest possible impact.
Q. How can technology companies like IBM help bridge the gap between climate data collection and actionable insights for policymakers and businesses?
With the power of our AI solutions, we can track and turn large volumes of data into actionable insights. This applies to many kinds of organisations.
Let me give you examples of this from our CSR work. Our project with the United Nations Development Programme developed modelling and forecasting tools to help analyse complex energy issues.
One of these solutions is the Electricity Access Forecasting AI model, which provides future forecasts of electricity access through 2030 by evaluating various data factors: population, infrastructure, urbanisation, elevation, satellite data and land use.
The model contains data from 102 countries across the Global South, focusing on Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East.
Insights from this model can be used by policymakers to inform future energy initiatives or evaluate which communities may require additional support for electrification by 2030.
By making models like this available for free, our aim is to help users more easily access the data required to interpret complex clean energy challenges and opportunities.
Q. What emerging technologies or innovations in the energy sector do you believe have the most potential to significantly impact climate change mitigation?
For us, the technology currently poised to make the greatest impact on climate challenges is AI — because of how powerful it can be to help us understand and execute against complex climate issues with tens of thousands of contributing factors and variables, coupled with scale and speed.
We’re already deploying AI in different ways through the IBM Sustainability Accelerator. For example, we worked with the organisation Sustainable Energy for All on two AI-powered projects to enable policymakers to identify specific energy and infrastructure needs in the face of climate change for communities in developing regions.
First, we launched Open Building Insights, an interactive online platform that visually consolidates data in a map, providing information related to buildings in countries addressing urban planning challenges. Second, we developed an open-source AI model, Modeling Urban Growth, which is designed to predict where cities will grow.
These solutions create both a current and future view of buildings, which can be key to determining the energy needs of a certain urban area. In this way, AI can help us make data-driven decisions — ultimately enhancing urban planning and energy access initiatives.
Q. How is IBM addressing the energy consumption and environmental impact of its own data centers and AI operations?
As a leader in AI technology and as a responsible corporate citizen, IBM recognises the critical importance of developing and using these technologies sustainably. We understand the potential environmental impact of AI systems and are taking proactive steps to address this.
By focusing on the sustainability of AI, we're not only reducing our own environmental footprint but also creating more efficient and cost-effective solutions for our clients.
A few considerations that can help are locating your processing in proximity to clean energy grids, following a hybrid cloud approach and using the right infrastructure to save energy, along with operational efficiencies AI can help optimise.
There are also ways companies can optimise how large language models operate with AI, and what types of processors are utilised, which can all increase efficiencies by multiple significant factors.
At IBM, we remain on track to meet our current goal of procuring 75% of our worldwide electricity consumption from renewable sources by 2025 and 90% by 2030. Overall, approximately 70% of the electricity consumed by IBM came from renewable sources in 2023.
AI can be a powerful tool for sustainability. It can reveal how the environment is changing, help organisations understand their impact and give insights on how to adapt.
Q. In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges in scaling and implementing climate technologies globally, particularly in developing countries?
Since launching the IBM Sustainability Accelerator, we’ve learned about a few elements that are particularly important to scaling technology in developing countries in the most impactful way.
First, AI is going to continue to be an essential factor. AI-powered solutions are allowing us to analyse and process huge volumes of valuable data about climate impacts. This information is critical to deploying solutions where they are most needed.
Secondly, you must work closely with partners on the ground to understand local realities. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to climate challenges. The needs of the end user must be the first priority when designing solutions in order to address their biggest challenges.
Finally, with the right approach, solutions can be scaled worldwide. Thoughtful innovation can result in solutions that support different countries, communities and challenges.
Developing and re-training AI models for multiple use cases is a great example of this, helping maximise the impact of a single project.
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