Not surprising to note that Big Data can transform the economy into a fundamental green economy. Climate change is the biggest challenge affecting mankind as a community, and environmental big data helps people understand many of its dynamic interdependencies. The use of Big data to combat global warming is what is called as Green Data.
Big data is the technology that allows everyone to examine the knowledge revolution and to create new developments and solutions. This technology has the potential to help fight climate change much faster. Big data tackles the problems that cause climate change by detecting toxic pollutants or finding pressure points in the supply chain.
Taking the example of markets, to function both efficiently as well as effectively need a huge amount of adequate data regarding the products to be traded and various other information on the factors affecting the trade. Manufacturing companies, regardless of their products, require vast information about the origin of their commodities and details about its production. But the investors of the commodity are uninformed about the vast information about the product and when it comes to the customers, the information is still less.
When the data is available to the investors and customers, they would be able to make informed decisions on investing and purchase and this leads to production, investment as well as usage of greener products.
In the case of the petroleum extraction industry, Oil-sands oil refined fuel produces almost twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as North Sea oil does. But at the moment there is no way for investors and customers to realize this, and thus no way to show a preference for the greener version. This eventually becomes a problem for those companies, investors, and customers who make investments as well as purchase decisions giving due importance to ecology.
There exist enormous challenges in providing the vast data available to the customers and investors. Technology is one such challenge, with many food productions companies that have advanced IoT firms, it’s hard to see how small-scale producers in developing nations will share this form of data as only 58.8 percent of the world’s population has internet access.
There are already several businesses exploring ways to use big data to enter greener markets. The new carbon credit registries introduced in the US are a perfect example of this. Another example is the technologies developed by Oxy Low Carbon projects which envisage a world in which carbon credits are exchanged just as commodities are now.
A correlation has long been recognized between big data and climate change, and to date, the use of big data in climate science has been largely limited to measuring the harm caused by pollution and greenhouse gases. Big data combined with advanced planetary exploration, as we’ve noted previously, is one of the ways this is being applied.
