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Climatelinks 2023 Year in Review: Most Visited Blogs

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12 Jan, 2024

This post was originally published on Climate Links

Climatelinks 2023 Year in Review: Most Visited Blogs
jschoshinski
Mon, 12/18/2023 – 15:31

Climatelinks has over a thousand blogs, with more than 150 published just this year. The most visited blogs in 2023 offer technical guidance for practitioners, share successful interventions from countries where USAID works, and explore the intersections between climate change and other development sectors. 

Here are the five most visited Climatelinks blogs of 2023: 

Lunar Landscaping: How Digging ‘Half-Moons’ Helps Re-Green Niger

In the West African Sahel, climate change and desertification are contributing to reduced rainfall and increasingly poor soil health, which presents a problem for the many people in the region who rely on subsistence agriculture and herding livestock. In Niger, “half-moons” are an increasingly popular strategy for rainwater retention because of their low cost–but do they work? Satellite imagery from SERVIR can help answer this question.

What is Water Security?

This water security primer explores why water security matters, what works to improve it, and how to measure its outcomes. Water is essential to the stability of every country, so understanding water security means looking beyond the immediate question of supply to political, economic, social, and environmental impacts, including how strengthening water security can improve climate resilience. 

Towards Sustainable Fisheries in the Philippines

In the Philippines, overfishing, ocean acidification, and climate impacts have reduced fish catch and degraded marine resources. In the face of these challenges, local communities, with support from USAID, are taking steps to protect their way of life and create resilient and sustainable growth for fisheries and fishing communities.

How Can Climate Action Be Inclusive?

Inclusive climate action means both reducing the effects of climate change on the most vulnerable communities and ensuring the benefits and burdens of climate action are equitably distributed. This blog covers why inclusive climate action is important, how to achieve it, and where it is already being implemented. 

Hydropower in Tanzania: Planning for Resiliency

Hydropower generation is a key component of low-emissions development strategies, providing two-thirds of global renewable electricity generation. However, climate change impacts, such as sea level rise, flooding, and drought, threaten hydropower as power stations have to be near water sources. In drought-prone Tanzania, USAID supported the national utility to take an Integrated Resource and Resilience Planning approach to assess the impact of drought and other future scenarios on alternative power sector investments.

Honorable Mentions 

These blogs published in 2023 were also among the most-visited on the site this year. 

2023 Climatelinks Photo Contest Winners

The 2023 Climatelinks Photo Contest, which asked people from around the world to submit photos of their climate change and development work, received more than 250 submissions representing over 40 countries. This blog highlights the thirteen winners, which were selected from across sectors, including WASH, biodiversity, natural climate solutions, and more. 

Helping Communities in Zimbabwe Restore their Wetlands—and their Water

In Zimbabwe, only 21 percent of the country’s wetlands are considered ecologically stable. USAID Resilient Waters conducted an extensive series of discussions and meetings with communities in Zimbabwe to identify problems and develop solutions for conserving the other 79 percent. As a result, the community agreed upon four activities to support the rehabilitation of wetlands and rangelands.

Focusing on Agency can Strengthen Social and Behavior Change Programming to Support Climate Adaptation

Agency is a critical component of people’s ability to adapt and respond to changing circumstances and has the potential to strengthen resilience in the face of shifting external conditions. By studying agency through a gendered lens, health-focused social and behavior change practitioners can create programs that strengthen everyone’s capacity for climate change adaptation and build resilience to climate change.


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The most visited blogs in 2023 offer technical guidance for practitioners, share successful interventions from countries where USAID works, and more.

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Turning down the heat: how innovative cooling techniques are tackling the rising costs of AI's energy demands

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As enterprises accelerate their AI investments, the energy demand of AI’s power-hungry systems is worrying both the organisations footing the power bills as well as those tasked with supplying reliable electricity. From large language models to digital twins crunching massive datasets to run accurate simulations on complex city systems, AI workloads require a tremendous amount of processing power.

Of course, at the heart of this demand are data centres, which are evolving at breakneck speed to support AI’s growing potential. The International Energy Agency’s AI and Energy Special Report recently predicted that data centre electricity consumption will double by 2030, identifying AI as the most significant driver of this increase.1

The IT leaders examining these staggering predictions are rightly zeroing in on improving the efficiency of these powerful systems. However, the lack of expertise in navigating these intricate systems, combined with the rapidity of innovative developments, is causing heads to spin. Although savvy organisations are baking efficiency considerations into IT projects at the outset, and are looking across the entire AI life cycle for opportunities to minimise impact, many don’t know where to start or are leaving efficiency gains on the table. Most are underutilising the multiple IT efficiency levers that could be pulled to reduce the environmental footprint of their IT, such as using energy-efficient software languages and optimising data use to ensure maximum data efficiency of AI workloads. Among the infrastructure innovations, one of the most exciting advancements we are seeing in data centres is direct liquid cooling (DLC). Because the systems that are running AI workloads are producing more heat, traditional air cooling simply is not enough to keep up with the demands of the superchips in the latest systems.

DLC technology pumps liquid coolants through tubes in direct contact with the processors to dissipate heat and has been proven to keep high-powered AI systems running safely. Switching to DLC has had measurable and transformative impact across multiple environments, showing reductions in cooling power consumption by nearly 90% compared to air cooling in supercomputing systems2.

Thankfully, the benefits of DLC are now also extending beyond supercomputers to reach a broader range of higher-performance servers that support both supercomputing and AI workloads. Shifting DLC from a niche offering to a more mainstream option available across more compute systems is enabling more organisations to tap into the efficiency gains made possible by DLC, which in some cases has been shown to deliver up to 65% in annual power savings3. Combining this kind of cooling innovation with new and improved power-use monitoring tools, able report highly accurate and timely insights, is becoming critical for IT teams wanting to optimise their energy use. All this is a welcome evolution for organisations grappling with rising energy costs and that are carefully considering total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT systems, and is an area of innovation to watch in the coming years.

In Australia, this kind of technical innovation is especially timely. In March 2024, the Australian Senate established the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence to examine the opportunities and impacts of AI technologies4. Among its findings and expert submissions was a clear concern about the energy intensity of AI infrastructure. The committee concluded that the Australian Government legislate for increased regulatory clarity, greater energy efficiency standards, and increased investment in renewable energy solutions. For AI sustainability to succeed, it must be driven by policy to set actionable standards, which then fuel innovative solutions.

Infrastructure solutions like DLC will play a critical role in making this possible — not just in reducing emissions and addressing the energy consumption challenge, but also in supporting the long-term viability of AI development across sectors. We’re already seeing this approach succeed in the real world. For example, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia has adopted DLC technology to support its demanding research workloads and, in doing so, has significantly reduced energy consumption while maintaining the high performance required for AI and scientific computing. It’s a powerful example of how AI data centres can scale sustainably — and telegraphs an actionable blueprint for others to follow.

Furthermore, industry leaders are shifting how they handle the heat generated by these large computing systems in order to drive further efficiency in AI. Successfully using heat from data centres for other uses will be a vital component to mitigating both overall energy security risks and the efficiency challenges that AI introduces. Data centres are being redesigned to capture by-product heat and use it as a valuable resource, rather than dispose of it as waste heat. Several industries are already benefiting from capturing data centre heat, such as in agriculture for greenhouses, or heating buildings in healthcare and residential facilities. This has been successfully implemented in the UK with the Isambard-AI supercomputer and in Finland with the LUMI supercomputer — setting the bar for AI sustainability best practice globally.

The message is clear: as AI becomes a bigger part of digital transformation projects, so too must the consideration for resource-efficient solutions grow. AI sustainability considerations must be factored into each stage of the AI life cycle, with solutions like DLC playing a part in in a multifaceted IT sustainability blueprint.

By working together with governments to set effective and actionable environmental frameworks and benchmarks, we can encourage the growth and evolution of the AI industry, spurring dynamic innovation in solutions and data centre design for the benefit of all.

1. AI is set to drive surging electricity demand from data centres while offering the potential to transform how the energy sector works – News – IEA
2. https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/blog-post/2024/08/liquid-cooling-a-cool-approach-for-ai.html
3. HPE introduces next-generation ProLiant servers engineered for advanced security, AI automation and greater performance
4. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Adopting_Artificial_Intelligence_AI

Image credit: iStock.com/Dragon Claws

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