Reversing the decline in biodiversity is a very complex problem. Most attempts are either struggling to improve the situation or have failed. Part of the problem comes from trying to piece together all of the issues that surround biodiversity such as legislation, government policy, and economics in a way that any actions can have an impact. AI is the latest tool that can cut through this complexity so that actions can be targeted.
AI can be used to summarise a complex information about a situation. For example, I asked ChatGPT to find all of the legislation relating to the protection of insects. Surprisingly, it returned several pieces of legislation that I had never heard of such as the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and The Bees Act 1980. My follow up question asked if there had been any prosecutions under any of the legislations and it brought back a few cases. I then asked about the leading dragonfly experts in the UK and again it returned with several names and their contact details. In a matter of a few minutes I had pulled together a useful overview of some of the issues involved in the protection of insects in the UK.
There are limits to AI. The quality of the answers will only be as good as the data it has been trained on which may include biases. Also, the accuracy of the answers that are returned will depend on how the questions are being asked - vague questions will return vague answers.
An improvement to AI would be the ability to set up realtime monitoring of an area of interest so that the user is kept up to date with any changes in its situation. A welcome development in ChatGPT is that it includes the latest news for an area of interest. For example, the questions that I was asking on insects, it displayed an article from the Guardian about the Government’s Biodiversity Net Gain scheme and its progress after one year.
The recovery of biodiversity is a complex problem that will probably not have a complete solution because the situation will depend on compromises between food production, demand for housing, the management of climate change, reducing pollution and many other issues. However, AI is a powerful tool that can be used to manage the complex information around biodiversity so that campaigns can be more effective in improving weak conservation policies and the lack of enforcement laws.