A $5.7m nature-based sea wall project has been approved for Fiji through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation.
Commonwealth secretary general Patricia Scotland said this while speaking at a side event on building resilient economies at the Fourth Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Conference in Antigua and Barbuda on Wednesday.
Ms Scotland said it was essential to have a data pool which could be used to accelerate applications made for climate financing by smaller and vulnerable economies.
She said as a result of evidence received from agencies such as United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and the British Space Agency, data made a significant difference in the time it took to process applications.
Ms Scotland told participants that when the Commonwealth began the Climate Finance Access Hub in 2016, many applications would take two or three years to put together, and two or more years to be approved.
“And by the time they are approved, the circumstances under which they had been created had already worsened,” she said.
“By the time you get the money, the nature of the problem has metamorphosed.”
She said this had changed with the inclusion of about 20 climate finance advisers.
“What this has meant with the advent of AI and digitalisation is that we can pool, aggregate and disaggregate data and we are able to fashion and model virtually the sort of interventions needed. One most recent successful application that we made in relation to Fiji, it was using the data from UNOSAT, UNITAR and ourselves to fashion a nature-based seawall and the way in which it was created was taking the data we have, extrapolated it, modeling it, several iterations until we got it right.
“That application was made to the Adaptation Fund and it was granted within 12 months.”
She said this project in Fiji could be replicated across other islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean in need of similar seawalls via the use of AI to remodel and refashion applications quickly.
