SDAIA Offers Smart Solutions for Environmental Conservation in KSA
Source: Saudi Press Agency
The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) offers a range of smart solutions to support developmental sectors in the Kingdom by leveraging data and artificial-intelligence (AI) technologies.
The solutions include supporting national efforts aimed at preserving the environment and natural resources and achieving a sustainable future, in line with achieving the Saudi Vision 2030 targets. This stems from its role as a national reference for data and AI in the Kingdom, covering everything related to their organization and development.
These efforts are aligned with parallel efforts by SDAIA to enhance the Kingdom’s position as a leading country in data and AI, enabling investment, innovation, and the development of technological infrastructure.
The authority aims to promote the adoption of AI in priority areas to serve national priorities, given its expertise in operations, research, and innovation in the data and AI sector.
SDAIA has dedicated its efforts to establishing the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence in Environment, Water, and Agriculture in partnership with the Ministry of Environment, Water, and Agriculture. It aims to innovate sustainable solutions and applications using AI in the fields of environment, water, and agriculture.
The authority aims to build a data lake containing geospatial data and global satellite images from the past thirty years, as well as to conduct studies and research that benefit the environment, water, and agriculture sectors using AI.
SDAIA also aims to provide expertise in delivering AI solutions through various cases; working with historical, current, and future data; building and training national capabilities; and sharing knowledge across all AI technologies and tools. Additionally, it focuses on developing sustainable use cases and solutions to assist the environment, water, and agriculture sectors in easily providing data analytics.
The efforts of the authority have resulted in the innovation of a life model based on AI algorithms. The model reads nine historical earth data sets to determine their correlation with the vegetation cover change index and predicts the change that will occur over the next 6 years with an accuracy exceeding 90%.
SDAIA also presented a range of cases that directly contribute to combating the effects of climate change, predicting desertification, and increasing vegetation cover to build a vibrant community with a healthy lifestyle and enhance the aesthetic aspects of the Kingdom.
Moreover, it has developed a data dashboard on vegetation cover change in the Kingdom, containing 6 billion data samples from the Normalized Difference Vegetation (NDVI) Index monitored from 1984 to 2023, and classified land into six types using satellite images.
SDAIA launched the “Smart Planet Program,” which is an intelligent platform for earth data that utilizes its historical data to build predictive algorithms. It has conducted studies, research, and design of several preliminary solutions for AI algorithms, sharing them with nature reserves and the Ministry of Environment, Water, and Agriculture.
This aims to create innovative solutions to help leverage and sustainably exploit untapped resource potential, detect changes in vegetation cover, monitor and control agricultural crops, and monitor changes in water bodies.
To address various challenges using AI techniques, the Ministry of Energy, in collaboration with SDAIA, announced the launch of the Artificial Intelligence Center for Energy, which aims to leverage AI in supporting initiatives within the energy sector, contributing to achieving the goals of Saudi Arabia’s Green Initiative in reducing carbon emissions.
The center plays a pivotal role in developing AI and modern technologies in the energy sector, bringing together digital technology experts and energy experts into one team. It has also worked on developing a clear methodology to prioritize AI solutions.
Meanwhile, SDAIA is actively monitoring reforestation and green areas in Riyadh through the National Smart Cities Platform using satellite imagery.
This is aimed at building and training AI models and processing data to provide a visual representation of green areas in Riyadh, displaying the percentage of green areas compared to the total area.
It creates indicators for the top neighborhoods in the green areas index and develops an index that measures the percentage of green areas within Riyadh and Diriyah.
Additionally, it provides a tool on the National Smart Cities Platform specifically for displaying and monitoring green area levels.
