How AI Is Changing Sustainability: An Interview with Prof. Henrik von Wehrden

Artificial intelligence (AI) seems, at first glance, to be a miracle cure for any dilemma blocking progress to a sustainable future. With its astonishing capacity to recognize patterns in unstructured data and provide usable information, it would seem as though AI is the tool the world has been waiting for to catalyze sustainability and find solutions to the planetary environmental crises.

However, as is often the case, the power of the solution is tempered by human-centered variables, including business and academic priorities, expertise in specific fields, and intellectual silos that prevent the sort of collaboration that would allow AI to reach its full potential.

A recent article in Nature Sustainability highlights the difficulty of balancing the power of advanced AI applications with deep sustainability expertise to find practical solutions to some of sustainability’s seemingly intractable problems. In “Artificial Intelligence in Sustainable Development Research,” authors Charlotte Gohr and Gustavo Rodriguez et al. show that current academic research has a gap between sophisticated AI methodologies and deep domain expertise in sustainability. While there is considerable academic research focusing on AI’s ability to improve forecasting, system optimization, data mining, and accelerated experimentation in areas like clean energy efficiency and vegetation, AI is underutilized in social sustainability areas such as reducing poverty and increasing social equity.

The authors also note that the discourse surrounding AI is often dominated by techno-optimists who see it as a revolutionary leap toward miraculous solutions, when, in fact, those solutions will require deep sustainability expertise and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Until that happens, much AI research in sustainability remains focused on optimization in technical areas like water resource management, vegetation monitoring, energy systems, and pollution control.

3E recently sat down with Prof. Henrik von Wehrden, the head of the research group that published the article, to dig more deeply into the application of AI in sustainability research and in practice. Prof. von Wehrden is professor and chair of Normativity of Methods at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, and an associate at the Institute for Sustainability Education and Transdisciplinary Research. He has published sustainability research in several academic journals, has been a scientific project manager for many sustainability projects, and is the driving force behind the Sustainability Methods Wiki, which provides extensive insights into the methods, terms, and tools that support sustainability.