[CHATTER] [MUSIC PLAYING] KATE BRANDT: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Sustainable
with Google. We really appreciate
your taking the time to be here with us in Brussels,
as well as those of you who are tuning in on the livestream. Before we start
today, I did just want to take a
moment to acknowledge the horrific civilian attacks
that have taken place in Israel and the escalating conflict
that is now underway. Our thoughts are
with everyone who has been impacted by
these recent events. We at Google have a really
long history in Israel. And in fact, many
of the products we're going to be
discussing here today were built by our teams
who live and work there. Now at Google, we deeply
believe that the path to climate action, it needs to
involve everyone, from organizations to
governments as well as individuals. And so during our
time here together today, we'll be announcing
some exciting new solutions, sharing progress towards
our climate goals, and also continuing
the conversation after the keynote
for those of you who are here with us in person. So I'd now like to kick
it over to a great message from our CEO, Sundar Pichai. SUNDAR PICHAI: Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. Whether you're in Brussels
or joining virtually, we are grateful for
your partnership. Fighting climate change is
humanity's next big moonshot. And as with any
moonshot, we're going to have to answer some big
questions to get there. At Google, we've been asking
these questions for 25 years. Can a company at
our scale operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy? How can we use
technology to help others achieve
their climate goals and make more
sustainable choices? We continue to make progress
across all of these areas. For example, behind me
is our Bay View campus in California, where buildings
are powered by wind, solar, and geothermal. And in Belgium, we are on
track to operate at or near 80% carbon-free energy in 2024. The biggest question
is still ahead Can we leave a healthy planet
for future generations? I believe the answer is yes. That's in part because of the
progress being made globally to transition to a
sustainable future. We've worked hard
to lead by example. We began purchasing
clean energy in 2010. By 2017, all our
energy purchases were matched with
100% renewable energy. And today, 2/3 of the energy
used for our offices and data centers is 24/7 carbon-free. Our goal is to reach 100%
by the end of the decade. We are excited about the ways
we can keep driving the energy transformation through steps
like our next generation geothermal project in Nevada,
which will be online soon. We are also harnessing AI for
new breakthrough solutions. For example, we
recently shared research that will help
airline partners use AI to decrease contrails,
a major contributor to global warming. AI powers Flood Hub, our system,
which can predict floods up to a week in advance. It now covers more than 460
million people in 80 countries. And I'm excited to share
that starting today, we are expanding Flood Hub to
the United States and Canada. With the help of AI,
one billion people have made more sustainable
choices through our products. For example, fuel-efficient
routing in Google Maps has helped prevent more
than 2.4 million metric tons of carbon emissions. That's the equivalent of taking
about 500,000 fuel-based cars off the road for an entire year. And in partnership
with local governments, we are advancing
Project Green Light. It uses AI to reduce stop and
go traffic at intersections and reduce emissions. We are now expanding
this project to more than a dozen
cities around the world, from Rio to Budapest. Through our products, we
want to help people, cities, and other partners
collectively reduce 1 gigatons of carbon equivalent
emissions annually by 2030. That's equal to the emissions
of a major country, like Japan. We'll continue sharing
tools that help, from making the latest AI
models available through Google Cloud to helping city
governments understand and reduce their emissions
with our Environmental Insights Explorer tool. And we'll keep asking
the big questions to help build a more
sustainable future and work to find
answers with all of you. Thanks again for being here. I'll turn it over to
the team to get started. BEN GOMES: Good morning. My name is Ben Gomes, and I've
been at Google for a long time, over 24 years now. And most of the time
I worked on Search in various different
capacities, including leading the Search team. In the last year I took on a
role, leading sustainability efforts across the company. And I joined various
people who are working in this area across the company,
including some people you're going to hear from today. As I took on this
role, I realized that beyond our ability to
decarbonize our data centers and our leadership
in clean energy, there are two ways
in which Google can have a unique impact. One is through our ability
to organize information, and second is through the power
of innovation and research, particularly in AI. So information goes to
the heart of our mission, organize the
world's information. But what does this mean in
the context of sustainability? If you think about
it, the future will be built upon decisions
made by people, by cities, by governments,
and those decisions will form the kind of future we
have, whether it's sustainable or not. And if we can
organize information to inform those decisions
that people can make, better decisions for a
sustainable future, that can have a significant impact. And you can see this
through our major products, like Search and
Maps, where people turn to us millions of times a
day for decisions like what's a route that will
save me with fuel, or what sort of heating system
should I use for my house? And you can see collectively,
if we make those decisions well, that can have a big impact. These decisions are also made
by cities and by governments. And for cities we have a tool
called Environmental Insights Explorer, which takes the aerial
imagery we develop for Maps and combines that
with AI in order to enable cities to
see opportunities that they might not otherwise
see for optimizing and building new infrastructure that
is more sustainable. We can't do all
of this ourselves, because the needs of
corporations and all are quite different. And so we also provide tools
like Google Earth Engine, as well as tools and
Cloud, that enable business leaders to create
the solutions to enable more sustainable business practices. That's what we can do in
the area of information. In the area of research, we
have a really rich tradition. If you look at all
the developments that have happened in AI
recently, many of them came out of work
in Google Research. And that same approach can
be applied to key problems in climate change. You'll be hearing about some
of those approaches today. These two things can
also come together. And you can bring together the
power of organizing information with the power of AI to
make that information more accessible to people. And a great example of
this was Data Commons, which we launched two weeks
ago together with the UN, and that shows the power
of organizing information and making it accessible. And here's a video that
shows how that came to be. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - Every moment around the
world, people and organizations are generating data that can
be extraordinarily useful. And I think we have to
find a way to harness that to solve problems. The challenge has been
a lot of these data sets are very fragmented. Most of society's
complex challenges don't get solved with
a single data source. So this fragmentation
gets in the way of being able to use
the world's information to actually make a big
difference to everybody, everywhere. KATE BRANDT: Google's
mission is to organize and make easily accessible
all kinds of information. We are doing it now
for public data. We've gathered, standardized,
and processed data from tens of thousands
of tables, from hundreds of reliable global
sources, and pulled it into one easily understandable view. - This is the fun part. Now comes AI and natural
language processing. KATE BRANDT: Most people don't
think in terms of scatterplots, or variables of interest,
or data points, or triplets. They think in terms
of the question they want to ask of data. - Now imagine if you
could just simply ask the question in
ordinary English. - And then you get
back these graphs that help get you
insights and that let you explore more
deeply in sensible ways. That ability to make data
accessible and intelligent, pragmatic, practical at
the organization level makes Data Commons, I
think, an essential tool for organizations as
they're doing their work. - Generative AI now powers
some of the most important functionality in data commerce. With large language models,
you can ask your questions and start getting answers. Imagine, for example,
I'm a climate NGO, and I'm trying to understand
how access to electricity has changed across
countries in Africa. I'd search for it
on Data Commons. From these charts, we see
that Kenya, Somalia, and Ghana have had some of the
greatest increases in access to electricity. I wonder what the impact of
this on their greenhouse gas emissions has been. From these charts, we can see
that Ghana's greenhouse gas emissions have gone
up substantially more than that of Kenya. These observations are the
beginning of a journey for us to better understand how
we could increase access to things like electricity
without proportionately increasing greenhouse
gas emissions. - When it comes
to actually taking action out of the
insights from this data, it's going to take
people on the ground. We also have to think
about this responsibly. So that's why doing
this together, and thinking about
partnerships, collaborations, I think is so, so important. - It's these people who have
deep domain knowledge, who know what the right
questions to ask are, who know what the right
solutions to build are. [END PLAYBACK] BEN GOMES: I'm really
excited about the potential of Data Commons, what other
people can do with it, too. Research and information
are really powerful tools, but climate change
is a huge problem, and it can be daunting
to know where to begin. We've chosen two major themes,
transportation and energy, because these are two areas
that contribute the most emissions in the world today. They are also
areas where we felt we could have the most impact. We'll also be talking a
little bit about adaptation, because unfortunately
in the world today there are more and
more significant weather events to which the
world has to respond, and we are building
tools to help with that. This is not going to be easy. It's a daunting problem, not
just for us, but for the world. But I've seen Google approach
hard problems in the past. And I really believe
that with these tools and with this
approach, we can really be helpful in this fight
against climate change. With that, let me hand over to
Yael to talk about our efforts in transportation. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - I love my electric-- - Vehicle. - Let's go have some fun. - Ho, ho, ho. - That is very impressive. - We need public transit
to become lower carbon. - We are changing our
public transit culture. - This battery can
turn any bike electric. - We are doing the e-bike race. - Doesn't look like
a standard bike. - We're feeling hopeful
about the future. What we do matters. [END PLAYBACK] YAEL MAGUIRE: Thanks, Ben. The global transportation sector
produces a significant amount of the world's
greenhouse gas emissions. And it's a problem we
believe technology, like AI, can help address, from improving
daily commutes to reducing the impact of flying. Let's start with one of the
ways we're working with cities. You know the frustration you
feel when you're in a rush, and you hit red light
after red light. Stop-and-go traffic is
bad for the climate, too. Cars at city
intersections generate 29 times more emissions
than cars on an open road. To help address
this, Google Research created Project
Green Light, which leverages AI to help cities
optimize traffic lights, reduce emissions, and make
traffic flow more efficiently. As Sundar mentioned,
today we are happy to share that
this technology is now being used in 12 cities around
the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Manchester to Jakarta. And we plan to scale
to more cities in 2024. The idea here is to optimize
not just one intersection at a time, but to create what
we call green corridors, waves of green lights at
multiple intersections, improving traffic
flow and reducing emissions in stop-and-go
traffic throughout the city. Green Light is more
actionable, scalable, and cost-effective for cities
than alternative options, because our AI-based
recommendations work with existing
infrastructure and traffic systems. So city engineers are
able to monitor the impact and see results within weeks. I'd like to quickly share
how this has helped a traffic engineer in Manchester. So let's take a look. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - A city the size of
Greater Manchester, we've got 2,400 traffic signals. Getting data for each of those
points is a real challenge. So the recommendations that
came through the Green Light Initiative were
relatively small. It was to reallocate
a few seconds from one movement to another. But the benefits which
the initiative delivered were quite large. The first was around
data, collecting data, to understand how the
network is performing, and the second is
around engineers' time. We've got very limited
engineers' resource. It identified the locations
where the engineer was more likely to deliver
a benefit in refining, changing those signal timings. So at one of the locations where
we implemented the changes, we saw a 9% improvement
in the AM peak and an 18% improvement
in the PM peak. So that's reduced emissions,
improved air quality. [END PLAYBACK] YAEL MAGUIRE: So
early numbers indicate a potential for up to a
30% reduction in stops. In the intersections where
Green Light is already live, this can save fuel
and lower emissions for up to 30 million
car rides monthly. Now let's talk about how
people get sustainably around every day,
from heading to work to picking up groceries. fuel-efficient
routing in Google Maps uses AI to suggest routes with
fewer hills, less traffic, and constant speeds with
the same or similar ETA. Drivers can specify
their engine type, whether that's petrol,
diesel, hybrid, or electric. So your route can be optimized
to save the most fuel or energy for your trip. And as you just
heard from Sundar, fuel-efficient
routing is estimated to have helped prevent more
than 2.4 million metric tons of carbon equivalent emissions
since launching in 2021. That's like taking approximately
500,000 fuel-based cars off the road for a year. So far it's been available in
places like Europe and the US, and we work to develop
models specific to the cars and unique driving
patterns around the world. But to bring this
option to more people, we'll start rolling out
fuel-efficient routing in India and Indonesia this year. And as part of
that rollout, we'll also be expanding
fuel-efficient routing to two-wheelers in
those two countries to help people travel
more sustainably. So now let's talk
about choosing a car. This is a big
decision for everyone. More and more people
are considering EVs for the first time. Global EV-related
searches have nearly doubled over the past two years. But there are many
questions that come up when buying an
EV for the first time. For example, how far is the
battery going to charge? How long is it
going to take you? So that's why we've been working
to revamp the car research experience on Search. So let me show you what's new. First, if you're starting
to research for an EV, you might search for a term
like best electric car. But now you can quickly compare
factors like price and battery range, and discover new
models that you might not have heard of yet. You can even filter
results further, like by setting a price range. So this new EV comparison tool
is available now in the US, and we plan to bring it to
more countries in the future. Next we want to make
it easy to understand the true cost of buying an EV. New national incentives are
rolling out in many countries, but it can be confusing to know
which vehicles will qualify. So for qualifying
EV models, we'll show federal incentive
information right in Search. This is already live
in the US, and we'll start showing
government incentives in France and Germany
by the end of the year. So beyond the purchase
price, many of us don't know how the
cost of charging compares to filling at the pump. So we're adding an updated
fuel cost calculator to electric and
fuel-based car results. This is now available in 21
countries around the world. Finally, there's
the common question that people have
around driving range. I'm an EV owner
myself, and I know that range anxiety is real. To help, we built a new battery
range explorer in Search. So now when you
search for an EV, you'll get a visualization of
how far you can go on a charge specific to that model. So we'll even show
you how much battery range you'll have upon arrival. You can enter your
own destination. So for example, it could
be your favorite vacation spot or a friend's home. And if it's a really
long trip, we'll show you how many charges
are needed along the way. This prediction takes into
account factors like elevation change and speed limits. The battery range explorer
is rolling out in the US now and coming to
Europe early next year. We hope this makes it easier to
decide if an EV works for you. We've been talking
a lot about cars, but we also want to help
you consider alternatives to driving that could
save you time or money and reduce emissions
at the same time. So to help make cycling
easier for more people, we've been working
with local governments to ensure Google Maps shows
up-to-date cycling routes. For example, this year we
collaborated with organizations like Transport for London to
add hundreds of kilometers of new bike lane data to Maps. Thanks to insights from
these organizations, we've been able to
prioritize cycling on safer, quieter roads. And these updates are
now available to cities around the world. We're also showing new
coloring on bike routes to show where bike lanes
are, so that you can know what to expect at a glance. In total, these changes
are improving the journeys of more than 60 million people
who come to Maps every month for cycling directions. So looking at directions we
give in Google Maps, 1 in 10 car trips in Europe could be
taken by walking or transit and arrive within five minutes
of the same time as driving. In France, we've been
working with the government on their initiatives to provide
alternatives to driving. Coming soon to Maps
users in France, were piloting a feature
to provide alternatives to driving. So when you search for
driving directions, Google Maps will analyze public
transit and walking routes, and suggest them alongside
your driving route if they're practical and
comparable in the same time. This feature will make it easier
for people to discover and make more informed sustainable
travel decisions every day. Now, of course,
sustainable travel isn't just about local trips. We're also working
to make long distance travel more sustainable. One of the ways
we're doing this is to help people find
alternatives to flying. For example, say you search
for flights from Madrid to Barcelona. That's the most traveled
air route in Europe. But there are
high-speed rail options that are only an hour longer
than the shortest flight. So when considering time,
price, carbon emissions, rail can often be
the better choice. Soon we'll show
relevant train routes when people search for
flights in Google Search, so travelers can understand
all their options. But there's also
times when flying is the best or only option. And that's where we're working
with partners on new approaches to reduce warming. For example, contrails,
those thin white lines that you sometimes
see behind aircraft, account for 35% of aviation's
global warming impact. Our Google Research
team has been working with
Breakthrough Energy, using AI to develop
contrail forecast maps. Pilots can then choose
routes that avoid contrails, like by changing altitudes. We tested these predictions in
the real world in collaboration with pilots from
American Airlines, and succeeded in reducing more
than half of the contrails. This was the world's
first proof point that contrails can be avoided
by commercial aircraft. So today we're excited to
announce a new partnership with Eurocontrol, who manages
the airspace over Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg,
and the northwest Germany. It's one of the busiest
airspaces in the world. So now Eurocontrol will be able
to provide any aircraft flying through this airspace
with information about how to avoid contrails. We look forward to sharing
the results with you. Overall, there's so much
opportunity for technology to give people more
sustainable options without significant
cost or time trade-offs. We're going to continue
to work to reduce the emissions of
the transportation sector in partnership with
policy makers and industry leaders around the world. I'd like to now pass it over to
Kate to talk to you about how we're helping people save energy
and accelerate the transition to renewables. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - We need to fix the
way that we stay cool. - There is something
that we can do about it. BEN GOMES: This thing
was my personal savior. - There are a lot of options
for solar systems at home. - We get to make all of
our own power right here. - Heat pumps are
such an amazing idea. - They're eco-friendly
appliances that can save you money and help save the planet. [END PLAYBACK] CAIT O'RIORDAN: Thanks, Yael. Outside of transportation,
the energy sector accounts for over 60% of
the world's greenhouse gas emissions, according
to Climate Watch. Energy is at the heart
of the climate change, but it's also key
to the solution. More organizations,
cities, and people are looking to transfer to clean
energy, and we want to help. At Google, we have
an opportunity to help people at
those critical moments, like when they're looking to
save on their energy bills or deciding on a new appliance
which might last them for 10 years or more. Last winter people across
Europe came to Google with questions about
the energy crisis. Search interest
for energy crisis hit an all-time high in 2023. And so that's why we partnered
with the International Energy Agency to show energy
saving tips right in Search. Together, we reached more
than 15 million people, helping to reduce their
energy consumption as well as save money. Now we know that reducing
energy usage alone isn't enough. How we heat and cool
our homes matters, too. But making sense of the options
can be really overwhelming, from navigating the financial
incentives and total costs to understanding those
efficiency ratings. And then we often need those
systems on really short notice, like when our boilers give
up in the middle of winter or our air conditioning
stops working during a record-breaking
heat wave. So today we're launching
a new experience on Google Search
that makes it easier for people to learn about and
compare heating and cooling systems. So when people search for
things like boilers or air conditioning, they'll
see information about potential options,
including their capabilities, and efficiencies, and
those financial incentives, all in one place. This is available now
in the US and France thanks to data from Energy
Star and energy.gov, as well as the
International Energy Agency. We'll bring it to more
people in Europe this winter. Helping people, businesses,
and cities source clean energy is also a critical part of
the clean energy transition. And solar is going to play a
really significant role here, accounting for 2/3 of
2023's projected increase in global renewable energy. In fact, on Search we saw
interest in rooftop solar power increase 60% on Google
and we're working to accelerate rooftop solar
deployment with new tools for both solar
installers as well as cities around the world. Earlier this year we
launched our Solar API, making detailed rooftop
data available to businesses to estimate rooftop solar
energy potential as well as those energy savings. So for example,
a solar installer can use the API to see detailed
solar information for an area, look at individual buildings to
see which will receive the most sunlight, and even
get a recommendation for which direction those
solar panels should face. The Solar API has information
for more than 320 million buildings worldwide, including
112 million buildings in the UK, France, and Germany. And for urban planners,
we're making it easier for facilities to
better incorporate solar into their development plans. Today we're introducing
a new feature in Google Earth which will
make it easier for planners to determine the best building
designs and the solar options for built-up areas. It's especially
helpful when optimizing designs for places with
ample spaces, like car parks. This will help cities
plan for development with the right information
to meet their sustainability goals. The preview is currently
available in the US, and we're planning to expand
coverage in the coming months. One of the biggest barriers
to bringing more clean energy online is the complexity of
connecting it to the grid. Governments and utilities need
to use sophisticated models to do so safely, but it can
be a really slow and painful process, with barriers
like aging infrastructure and severe weather
events causing delays. So that's why we
started Tapestry as an Alphabet project. It helps grid operators
map their network to better plan for a decarbonized future. Our AI-based tool allows them
to better model scenarios, like taking a
coal-based plant offline or predicting how a clean
energy source could be impacted by an extreme weather event. We've been developing Tapestry
with Chile's national system operator, who has
an ambitious target to operate 100%
renewable grid by 2030. Even in its early
stages Tapestry has helped them run scenarios
much more efficiently. They can now run 12 times
more future scenarios than they could
with previous tools. Our partner in Chile recently
visited the Tapestry team, and he shared a few thoughts. Let's see what they said. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - We know that if we really want
to accelerate the transition, we need to integrate
new technologies, and new technologies
that are going to help us to do our work in a better way. So there is no way we can do
it with the current tools. The discussion with Tapestry
was a little bit different. So basically they approached
us and say, OK, where are your biggest problems? What are you trying to shift? What are your major challenges
to accelerate the energy transitions? So what we're trying
to achieve here is just to build the next
level of software that is going to help us basically
to analyze the grid with much more information, more accurate,
and with a lot more scenarios, so that we can take better
decisions both on the planning side, looking at the
long-term, but also on the day-to-day operations
at the control room. [END PLAYBACK] CAIT O'RIORDAN: This
is just the beginning. Given how critical
this work is, Tapestry is focused on using those
learnings from Chile to help other energy
partners around the world evolve their grid
more responsibly. So now let me pass it to Yossi,
who's going to share with us the role that technology
can play in adaptation, and our efforts to help
prevent or minimize the effects of climate change. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - Adaptation measures
range widely, from installing
fountains in cities to combat rising heat
to constructing seawalls to prevent flooding. - What are we doing
to prevent wildfires? Smaller fires can help
forests be more resilient. We can still go down
a different path. - We can use AI to develop
complex climate models. Disaster models can help us
mount more effective responses. - Trees help us, filtering
the air we breathe and cooling the climate. - It's the most exciting
thing in the world. [END PLAYBACK] YOSSI MATIAS: Thank you, Cait. I'm pleased to be able
to join all of you here today in Brussels
from my hometown Tel Aviv. Before I start, I would
like, with the greatest personal sorrow and
pain, to pay tribute to the many hundreds of
Israelis of all ages, including families, killed in
the horrific terrorist attack in Israel, and to those
still abducted and missing-- situation is still ongoing-- and wish them all
to be safe home. I want to acknowledge
my colleagues who are in Israel right now, many
of whom contributed to the work you'll hear about today. It's an incredibly difficult
time for all of us. And I'm grateful and proud
to share the work with you. We've talked about ways
we're reducing emissions to slow the progress
of climate change, but its effects are already
here, impacting all of us, particularly in the most
vulnerable communities. Google is often the first place
people turn to for information. As climate change
intensifies, people are searching for events
like wildfires and monsoons more than ever. For events like these,
timely information is critical to help minimize
damage and loss of life. Our goal is to provide
useful, actionable information to individuals today,
and empower communities to plan and build
resilience in the long-term. Today I'd like to share how
we're helping with floods, wildfires, and extreme heat. Every year floods cause
thousands of fatalities worldwide, disrupt
the lives of millions, and cause significant
financial damages. Since 2018 we've made
progress applying AI to forecast river floods. By building breakthrough
global hydrological AI model, and combining it with publicly
available data sources, we are able to predict floods
up to seven days in advance. Earlier this year, we announced
that we are providing forecasts on our Flood Hub
platform in 80 countries, covering 460 million people. Today we're making river
and flood forecasts available in the USA and Canada,
covering more than 800 sites by rivers that more than
12 million people live. Aid organizations,
governments, and people can use this information
to better prepare. Our long-term goal
and ambition is to scale further and cover
more types of floods. Wildfire pose an equally
difficult challenge. I experienced a wildfire
in 2010 when one broke out in the Carmel mountain in
Israel near our Google office, but there was no helpful
information available online, and we didn't know if
we needed to evacuate. We understood how critical it
is to get the right information to people and help
them stay safe. And this led to creating SOS
alerts in Search and Maps with timely authoritative
information about major crises. So far this year we've
activated SOS alerts for 120 wildfire events, helping
30 million people stay safe and informed. We're also researching how
AI can help track fires and predict how
they will spread. Leveraging AI and
satellite imagery, our wildfire boundary
tracker maps the boundaries of large-scale fires with
updates every 15 minutes. This is already live
in parts of the US, Canada, Mexico, and
Australia, and we're working to expand coverage
to more countries. In addition to knowing where
wildfires currently exist, firefighters need to
anticipate where they will go and even how to prevent
them before they start. We are collaborating with
the US Forest Service to make the biggest updates
to their fire spread model in 50 years. This will use machine
learning to help fire authorities prevent and
battle large-scale fires more safely and efficiently. Finally, extreme heat. It's been reported that
this past summer was the hottest on record. And heat-related
deaths are on the rise. To help we launched extreme
heat alerts in 80 countries. When people search
for information, they see details on when
a heat wave is predicted to start and end,
tips on staying cool, and related
health concerns to be aware of from the
Global Heat Health Information Network. Cities are also looking for ways
to prevent heat islands, which are urban areas that
experience higher temperatures due to structures,
like roads and buildings, that absorb heat and re-emit it. Studies have shown that
planting trees for shade and reflecting roofs can
reduce the city's air temperature by 2 to 4 degrees
Celsius in the summer months. Yet local authorities often
lack data to guide their efforts or make the case for investment. Our Tree Canopy tool, part
of our Environmental Insights Explorer, combines
AI and aerial imagery to help cities better understand
where to plant more trees. We're also expanding tree canopy
data to more than 2,000 cities globally. We're also piloting a cool
roofs tool across 15 cities in the coming weeks. Places like New York,
Nashville, and Melbourne will be able to use
AI and aerial imagery to map our solar
reflectivity of their cities, so urban planners
and governments can identify what areas
would benefit most. We know there's more work
to do and are committed to continuing to advance
our AI research boldly and responsibly, working in
collaboration with cities, governments, NGOs, and
the UN Early Warnings for All initiative to help
more people around the world. With that, let me
pass it back to Kate. KATE BRANDT: Thank
you so much, Yossi. So before we wrap
up our keynote, I did want to spend just
a few minutes talking about how we're
working to operate Google more sustainably. So we're doing this
in four key ways, first, accelerating the
transition to a net zero future, also, advancing
water stewardship, building a circular economy,
and protecting nature and biodiversity. In 2021 we set our most
ambitious goal yet, which is that we want to achieve
net zero emissions across all of our operations and
value chain by 2030. And as a part of
this, we have a goal to run both our data centers
and our office campuses on 24 by 7 carbon-free
energy, or CFE, on every grid, where we operate. And last year 20 of our grid
regions achieved at least 85%. And since we started
building our data centers. It has been a really
big priority for us to operate them as energy
efficiently as possible. And we've done this even
as compute demand has increased really substantially. So of course, with AI
at an inflection point, this continues to be a
really big priority for us. And predicting the future growth
of energy use and emissions from AI compute is challenging. But what we do have is
tested best practices that we've been using
to reduce the carbon footprint of workloads. And these practices have enabled
us to reduce energy of training models by 100x and
emissions by up to 1,000x. So our plan is to continue using
these tested best practices, and also to keep developing
new ways to reduce and make AI more efficient. Now we also know
that climate change is causing water
stress, increasingly, in more parts of the world. And so we are committed
to responsible water use. We aim to replenish 120%
of the fresh water volumes we consume across our offices
and data centers by 2030. Now additionally, we know that
research shows that we cannot achieve net zero emissions
without accelerating the transition to a
more circular economy. And so one of the ways
that we're doing this is by keeping our products and
materials in use for longer, and this includes Chromebooks
as well as Pixel phones. So recently we announced
that Chromebooks will now receive 10 years of updates. And this is more than any other
operating system promises. Additionally, we're expanding
our Pixel phone support to seven years, and this
includes OS upgrades, security updates, and feature drops. And this will start
with the new Pixel 8. And then lastly, when it comes
to nature and biodiversity, wherever possible, we
strive to build biodiversity on-site at our offices
and our campuses by designing ecology and
bringing nature back to cities. So at Bay View, where Sundar
joined us in the video earlier in our program, this is the
most comprehensive example we have yet of our approach
to designing for ecology. So we have already covered
a lot of ground today. We shared how we're using
our products and our research to help reduce emissions
in transportation, from car trips to
aviation, and also how we are accelerating the
transition to a clean energy future in our homes as
well as across power grids. Now this includes things like
Project Green Light, which uses AI to optimize traffic
lights across cities, and also Google Search
features that make it easier for people who are
searching for EVs or new ways to cool and heat their homes. We also highlighted
how AI can be used to help both governments
and people who are already dealing with the impacts
of climate change, and this includes explaining
Flood Hub platforms to cover more communities, leveraging
ML to help firefighters, as well as expanding upon
our work on extreme heat. So for me, sustainability
has been a lifelong passion. And preserving our planet
for future generations, it's an extremely
personal thing. I spent a lot of my
childhood growing up in Northern California
outdoors, and now I have the opportunity to
raise my little daughter in this same special place. But it is also being
impacted by climate change, just like so many
parts of the world are. So our role, our
opportunity is to combine the energy and
optimism and ambition with power of information
and innovation at scale. So thank you all so much
for joining us today. We're going to continue this
important conversation here in Brussels with
some great speakers that we'll look forward
to hearing from soon. Thank you again. [APPLAUSE]
