Sustainability

29Artificial Intelligence and Computational Sustainability

S.K. Ram and R.D. Tyagi

INRS, Université du Québec, Québec, Canada

29.1 Introduction

Global estimates suggest that by 2050 the global population will reach a whopping 10 billion human habitants. The dramatic exhaustion of our natural resources at an alarming rate is slowly pushing our planet and the livelihood of all its inhabitants to extinction. The World Commission on Environment and Development in its report, Our Common Future (Keeble 1988) first introduced the concept of sustainable development as development that fulfills the needs of the present and at the same time doesn't compromise the needs of the next generations.

Essential issues in designing policies for development will require complex decision making, which needs to be supported by real-life data and facts. These policies will decide the future course of the pattern of consumption of our natural resources. Making such decisions in an optimized manner requires quantified facts acquired from actual data about the ecosystem, natural resources, history of use and abuse, and their consequences. In other words, we are talking about a huge mass of data, which directs us to computational sciences and thereby pushes us to the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational sustainability.

As defined by Russell and Norvig (2003), artificial intelligence (better known by its acronym, AI) is the intelligence displayed by machines or software, and the field ...