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Decarbonization through Digital Technologies

Interdisciplinary and International Collaboration Matters

Published on the 04 April 2025 by UNSW Business School EDI Team

Amelia Li is a PhD candidate at the School of Information Systems and Technology Management, supervised by Scientia Professor Shan Pan and Associate Professor Yenni Tim,UNSW Business School, focusing on exploring how digital technologies can be designed, deployed, and used to address various sustainability challenges.

Amelia also conducts research on taxonomy of green technologies and their impact on the workforce, inspired by when she worked as a research analyst/economist at a technology firm.

Amelia is a passionate advocate for the transformative power of technologies on our society and human life, especially in tackling economic, environmental, and social sustainability challenges.

This article is based on one of her research papers that won the 2023 – 2024 UNSW Business School Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Research Grant. These grants are awarded yearly and support UNSW Business School HDR Candidates to undertake research that contributes to achieving the UN SDGs by 2030.

Receiving the grant enabled Amelia to collect data and present her work at international avenues. This opportunity also allowed Amelia to collaborate with international researchers and practitioners to explore digital solutions for decarbonization.

Amelia shared her fascinating research journey with the UNSW Business School EDI team, which we have republished with permission. 

Motivation: Climate Change and Decarbonization

Amelia’s journey began in late 2023, when her research team decided to explore digital solutions for one of the most pressing global challenges to date: climate change.

The UN calls for developed countries to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impact” in SDG 13 and The Paris Agreement sets up the net-zero goal for our global society: stating that “greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030”.

To achieve this, it requires the union of all governmental and industrial stakeholders of our planet to collaborate and take immediate actions to accelerate the decarbonization process.

Net zero means cutting carbon emissions to a residual amount of emissions that can be absorbed and durably stored by nature and other carbon dioxide removal measures, leaving zero in the atmosphere. (United Nations, 2023)

There are two fundamental and complementary pathways for approaching net-zero: 1) reducing carbon emissions and 2) enhancing carbon sequestration (Rockström et al., 2017).

From a technological perspective, reducing carbon emissions through the use of emergent technological advances such as electric vehicles, mass community recycling, and increasing renewable energies sources such as solar and wind, will play a transformative role in this grand transition.

Moreover, digital technologies can also help to design and deploy more efficient systems to reduce CO2 emission from industrial operations and energy consumption.  But with the increase of technological advancements, so does the CO2 emissions into the air from the factories used to mass produce these “saving graces”.

Complementing the increased use of digital technologies, another pathway we can turn towards to remove the already emitted CO2 from the air which has been inflated by industrial carbon emission is carbon sequestration.

Carbon sequestration refers to the process of capturing, absorbing, and storing atmospheric carbon in the form of carbon stock – the absolute quantity of carbon held within a pool at a specified time. (European Environment Agency, 2022; UNREDD Programme, 2021).

The majority of these types of pools already existence as natural ecosystems, i.e., forests on land and mangroves in the wetlands. As part of her research, Amelia is studying these naturally occurring carbon stock pools and investigating if technology can play a part in creating artificial pools that could radically speed up the extraction of excess CO2 emissions form our atmosphere.

The Research Project: Designing AI-Based Systems for Carbon Stock Estimation

1) Interdisciplinary Collaboration

For decarbonization initiatives, interdisciplinary collaboration and partnership is vital for leveraging different expertise and optimizing outcomes.

To build the AI systems to implement decarbonization, Amelia and her supervisors collaborated with Dr Harry Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University College Cork (Ireland) and his PhD students, with their experiences in developing reliable AI for SDGs, they shared the same interests and leverage different domain knowledge to develop digital solutions for carbon sequestration.

Amelia’s research team focused on leading the design process, while the Cork computer science team tackle the technical challenges in the system’s interface and AI modelling to track Carbon Stock Estimation.

From February 2023 to December 2024, the collaboration between UNSW and University College Cork underwent two rounds of designing, developing, demonstration, and evaluation of their AI-Based Decision Support Systems for Carbon Stock Estimation in the hope of facilitating carbon sequestration in both research and practice.

This research has led to conference publications in both disciplines and is still ongoing with the potential to be used by a carbon trading company in their practice. 

2) Problem Domain: Carbon Stock Estimation Question and where to start?

After investigating the relevant literature, technical feasibility, and existing practices, Amelia’s research team narrowed down the research objective into a central problem - quantifying what is considered “carbon stock” by AI-based systems. 

The problem lies in the practical issues in carbon sequestration. The traditional field measurement for quantifying carbon stock involves manually collecting and measuring biomass from sample vegetations in specific areas.

It can be challenging, because this process is labour-intensive and hard to scale. In some cases, it is difficult for humans to physically access certain areas, due to remoteness or regional conflicts surrounding the natural ecosystems that are fundamental to the Carbon sequestration process, i.e the Amazon rainforest.

Nevertheless, carbon stock estimation is critical for enhancing carbon sequestration. For land developers, they need to understand the status of carbon stock on their lands for obtaining carbon offset certifications or applying for government fundings. For governing agencies, they need to verify this information to monitor carbon offset projects to enable real change. 

From this perspective, Amelia’s research is vital as if proven successful, not only will these AI-based Carbon sequestration decision support systems help to decrease the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, but ultimately, they will offer a lower cost incentive for governments and development industries.

3) Innovative Systems: how AI can solve the problem of quantifying Carbon Stock Emissions.

These practical challenges suggest that digital solutions for quantifying carbon stock should enable automation, scalability, and transparency, which can be achieved via AI-based systems.

Specifically, deep learning for image processing can detect vegetation coverage for estimating carbon stock on large scale imagery data. This AI capability will promote automation and scalability, especially of large natural ecosystems that are unquantifiable to humans on their own.

Secondly, using remote sensing data such as satellite images can promote transparency as the data is captured from space and would be hard to manipulate.

4) Showcase and Impact

Throughout the process, Amealia’s research is advancing and pushing the boundaries as to the limitless possibilities as to what AI and other information systems software can do.

Amelia and her research team were invited to showcase their project at the 2024 Future Climate & Clean Energy Expo hosted by UNSW in May last year, where they were able to demonstrate translational research and innovative technologies for tackling climate change. During the expo, they exchanged ideas with their peers and collected feedback on their presentation and their success to date.

Using novel technologies to facilitate decarbonization has received growing attention in the international scientific community.

Supported by the UNSW Business School SDG grant, Amelia has also had the opportunity to present and discuss her work at the Santa Fe Institute, the global research centre for complexity science and interdisciplinary research.

There, she engaged in discussions with Professor John Miller from Carnegie Mellon University, who has been conducting a project that utilizes satellite Nilometers to reduce carbon emissions from farming.

These efforts reflect the broader commitment of the scientific community that has been working collectively to tackle climate change through technological advanced solutions.

Reflecting on this journey, Amelia highlights that interdisciplinary and international collaboration alongside the collective efforts of the entire scientific community, global industries and national governmental bodies is key for making transformative technological innovation for decarbonization possible. 

References

  • European Environment Agency. (2022). Carbon stocks and sequestration in terrestrial and marine ecosystems: A lever for nature restoration? (Briefing 05/2022). https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/carbon-stocks-and-sequestration-rates/carbon-stocks-and-sequestration-in
  • Rockström, J., Gaffney, O., Rogelj, J., Meinshausen, M., Nakicenovic, N., & Schellnhuber, H. J. (2017). A roadmap for rapid decarbonization. Science, 355(6331), 1269–1271. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah3443
  • United Nations. (2023). For a livable climate: Net-zero commitments must be backed by credible action. United Nations | Climate Action; United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/net-zero-coalition
  • UNREDD Programme. (2021, July 15). Carbon Stock. UNREDD Programme. https://www.un-redd.org/glossary/carbon-stock