Trees, oceans and mental health: 3 ways entrepreneurs are using AI to solve global challenges

The arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) into our everyday lives is set to become a defining moment in human history.

Generative AI is changing the way billions of people work, and new use cases for AI are springing up every day.

While many are using AI with a focus purely on the bottom line in business, others are putting it to use to help accelerate the transition to a more sustainable global economy. The World Economic Forum’s UpLink platform, launched in partnership with Deloitte and Salesforce, is working to source and scale innovations that will help ensure the world meets the United Nation’s (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

These three companies, all UpLink Top Innovators, are using AI to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges.

The founders of Ellipsis Earth are developing software to identify and map waste to reduce the amount of plastic and other litter that ends up in the sea. The infographic below from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows the main routes for litter entering the ocean and the damage it can cause to marine creatures.

Cleaning up the ocean will be a colossal task. The UN’s Ocean Literacy Portal reports there are up to 75 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean and around 8-10 million tonnes of new plastic waste is entering the seas every year.

Ellipsis Earth uses AI and machine learning to categorize waste by type, weight, volume, environmental impact, residence time, carbon footprint, material, brand and recycling value.

The technology builds a profile of marine litter hotspots and uses data to target interventions that reduce environmental damage. It has been used in the UK and Italy to reduce beach littering by up to 75%, which ultimately leads to less waste getting into the sea.

While commercial forests provide timber for construction, furniture manufacturing and other wood products, they are also efficient carbon sinks and home to entire biological ecosystems. The infographic below from the US Forest Service shows how managed forests can help lock away the atmospheric carbon driving the climate crisis.

Treeswift is using AI, machine learning and robotics to provide foresters with actionable data that enables them to better manage their forests and trees.

Individual per-tree metrics such as trunk diameter, height and timber quality can be used to help measure biomass, leading to improvements in tree health as well as better land management practices. Treeswift says its technology provides a broad range of benefits: “Improving forest measurement techniques is a generational challenge as forest management, carbon emissions, wildfires, natural disasters, and loss in biodiversity are critically affecting the broader economy and society.”

The events of the last few years, a global pandemic followed by an economic and cost-of-living crisis, have taken a heavy toll on the mental health of millions of people. The statistics below from Mental Health America point to the scale of the problem in just one country – the United States.

The research shows more than 50 million people in the US are living with a mental health condition – but 28% of adults with a mental illness are unable to access treatment.

Wysa is an AI-guided platform that provides immediate mental health support as the first step of care for mental conditions. The app can help bridge the gap between patients and available care, the company says.

The app uses natural language to engage users in conversation about their mental state and offer solutions to help reduce the user’s anxiety and reframe their thinking – such as relaxation and deep-breathing techniques. The advice given by the Wysa app is created by qualified therapists, and is peer-reviewed and certified for safe use.

According to Wysa it has “held over half a billion AI chat conversations with more than five million people about their mental health across 95 countries. The worrying trend we saw in employee mental health led us to conduct in-depth studies of employees in the USA and UK, as well as Wysa's user base, to understand why current models aren't working”.