Climate and Sustainability Working Group

Our working group uses AI to solve urgent climate challenges. Through open collaboration, we are developing AI models and complimentary tools to drive sustainable solutions for Earth monitoring, environmental preservation, and climate action.

Join the Climate and Sustainability Working Group

Co-leads

  • Robert Shorten (Imperial College, UK)
  • Geeth de Mel (IBM Research, UK)

Projects

GEO-Bench

A transformative benchmarking suite for Earth Observation foundation models. GEO-Bench tackles the lack of reproducibility and systematic evaluation of geospatial foundation models by enhancing the initial version (GEO-Bench V1) with an expanded set of tasks, user-friendly features, and robust community engagement. It also includes a dedicated track for vision-language models (GEO-Bench-VLM), supported through a collaboration with NASA and ESA. With a leaderboard on Hugging Face and integration with IBM TerraTorch, GEO-Bench sets the standard for benchmarking geospatial foundation models. Planned release for 1H 2025.

Alliance Partners & Steering Committee: ServiceNow, IBM Research, MBZUAI, NASA, ESA, TU Munich, Arizona State University, Clark University

EarthDial

A groundbreaking vision-language model (VLM) designed to transform how we interpret Earth observation data. With capabilities extending from text to multiresolution, multispectral, and time-series datasets, EarthDial bridges complex geospatial analytics and accessibility. EarthDial generates both textual and pixel-level insights using a compounded strategy for domain-specific alignment, enabling non-experts to interactively explore geospatial data. EarthDial already surpasses state-of-the-art VLM benchmarks for a range of geospatial AI tasks and is currently being enhanced with Granite 3.0 integration. Planned release for 1H 2025.

Alliance Partners: IBM Research, MBZUAI

Agenda

Join our network to co-develop innovative AI solutions for climate and sustainability.

We invite volunteers to help advance AI for through:

  • Geospatial data fusion and model validation.
  • Creating sustainable AI tools for Earth observation.
  • Organizing community-driven events and hackathons.

Other resources

IBM-NASA Geospatial Foundation Models: IBM and NASA have teamed up to build a family of geospatial foundation models named Prithvi. You can access these via Hugging Face.

The IBM Granite Hugging Face page also provide enterprise-ready fine-tuned versions of the Prithvi models, including models for biomass estimation, urban heat island detection, predicting the canopy height, and downscaling climate projections.

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