The IBM Sustainability Accelerator is a social innovation program that supports communities facing environmental and economic stress around the world, through technologies like AI and an ecosystem of experts.
To date, the IBM Sustainability Accelerator has supported 20 global projects across four active cohorts focused on sustainable agriculture, clean energy, water management and resilient cities.
Our differentiators:
Solution: Deltares Aquality App
Project location: The Netherlands
Deltares, a nonprofit research organization based in the Netherlands, teamed up with IBM to enhance and expand the reach of its Deltares Aquality App to find a tech solution that helps farmers monitor nitrate levels and give insights into nutrient losses and local water quality.
Solution: OpenHarvest
Project location: Malawi
IBM and global nonprofit Heifer International collaborated to develop OpenHarvest—a mobile application that expands access to visual agricultural data, delivers specialized recommendations (via SMS text message) to farmers in Malawi through AI and climate modeling, and enables better farm and field management.
Solution: YvY
Project location: Latin America
Plan21 and IBM, together with developers from the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (TEC), supported the development of a mobile application, YvY, that provides farmers with technical training to make use of insights from weather data, agronomic data and carbon footprint calculations that facilitate production management and allow better adaptation to environmental stress.
Solution: CRM Connect
Project location: India
IBM and the Nature Conservancy Centre India developed a public information platform called CRM Connect, a dashboard and web portal, to promote regenerative farming practices in India, with the aim of fostering agricultural sustainability and reducing the impact of environmental stress on communities.
Solutions: Liquid Prep, Soil & Water Assessment Tool (“SWAT”) VEXA
Project location: United States
IBM and Texas A&M AgriLife collaborated to advance sustainable farming with solutions including Liquid Prep, which helps farmers optimize water use, and SWAT VEXA, an interactive Gen AI virtual assistant providing soil and water insights. These solutions aim to support farmers, water and land managers, and communities in both agricultural and urban regions in the U.S.
Solution: Green Taqa
Project location: Egypt
IBM and Environment Without Borders Foundation (EWBF) created Green Taqa, an innovative platform ecosystem designed to expand access to clean energy resources and providers for communities across Egypt.
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Solutions: Open Building Insights and Modeling Urban Growth
Project location: Kenya and India
IBM and Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll) worked together on two projects, Open Building Insights and Modeling Urban Growth, to enable policymakers to identify energy and infrastructure needs for communities in developing regions.
Solutions: Electricity Access Forecasting (AI model) and Clean Energy Equity Index (statistical geospatial model)
Project location: Global south—Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East
To support data-driven decision-making toward a just energy transition, IBM and UNDP launched new interactive models to analyze complex energy issues.
Net Zero Atlantic is collaborating with IBM to create an interactive digital tool that will geospatially display environmental and socioeconomic impacts of possible energy system futures for Nova Scotia. Ultimately, the goal is for Indigenous communities in Nova Scotia to leverage advanced modeling capabilities to inform their input into energy and development planning.
The Miyakojima City Government is working with IBM to support the development of a renewable energy strategy including a microgrid on Miyakojima Island, a distant community facing severe climate issues due to typhoons in Japan, with the goal of helping their residents, who rely on a clean local environment for the tourist industry and agriculture.
IBM and the University of Sharjah will build a model and application to monitor and forecast water access conditions in the Middle East and North Africa, to help support communities in arid and semi-arid regions with limited renewable internal freshwater resources.
IBM and the University of Chicago Trust in Bangalore will aggregate water quality information in India; build and deploy tools designed to democratize access to water quality information and help improve water resource management for key government and nonprofit organizations.
IBM and the University of Illinois will develop an AI geospatial foundation model to help predict rain fall and flood forecasting in mountain headwaters across the Appalachian Mountains in the U.S.
IBM and Instituto IGUÁ will create a cloud-based platform for sanitation infrastructure planning in Brazil, alongside local utility providers and governments.
IBM and the Water Corporation will design a self-administered water quality testing system for Aboriginal communities in Western Australia.
IBM and C40 Cities, a global network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities, are working together to create a data-driven, AI powered solution to help cities analyze potential risks that may arise as a result of extreme heat and the urban heat island effect. The new solution aims to enable cities to create adaptation strategies to help alleviate population health risks and economic burdens, while strengthening national resilience efforts.
Through an agreement with World Food Program USA, IBM is collaborating with the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to enhance WFP’s “GeoTar” geospatial tool with advanced AI and data capabilities. GeoTar creates vulnerability maps, helping improve operational decisions like targeting and prioritization. The new features will support WFP Country Offices that are engaged in combatting global hunger and improving food security, which can be disrupted by environmental disasters, such as droughts, floods or landslides.
IBM and Mass General Brigham, a nonprofit integrated academic healthcare system, are working together to develop an AI tool for healthcare systems and community health centers confronting extreme heat. The tool will be built to help predict hyperlocal extreme heat events, identify at-risk patients, and deliver reliable, automated warnings when a heat wave is imminent. The new solution will inform patients of resources available to them, while helping clinicians to take preventative action by screening for, and intervening upon, patient risk factors.
IBM and the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy are collaborating to build a city data and analytics platform. By consolidating city-level data, the platform will be designed to enable data-based decision making for informed interventions by governments in India that aim to improve quality of life for urban populations, such as by improving service delivery and fostering sustainable urban development.
IBM and Kota Kita, a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable, socially just, equitable, and democratic cities, are working together to develop new AI models to identify and respond to the needs of Samarinda (Indonesia) citizens who are exposed to climate stress. The models will be designed to consider physical vulnerabilities, such as natural disasters, and economic and social variables, such as demographic growth and access to clean water.
IBM believes that science, technology and innovation can help tackle environmental stress while helping communities to address societal needs.
According to the World Bank, climate-related disasters and natural hazards push 26 million people into poverty each year, putting these populations in need of technical, financial and institutional resources that enable communities to respond to climate change, support climate adaptation and build resiliency.
By uniting experts and technology, IBM wanted to find a way to scale and speed up solutions that support communities.
The IBM Sustainability Accelerator has had 20 engagements, each with a different nonprofit or government organization, divided into four cohorts: sustainable agriculture, clean energy, water management and resilient cities.
IBM selects five organizations each year—forming a cohort—to focus on addressing a specific social innovation issue area in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The selection process includes a public RFP open to any nonprofit or government organization. Proposals are reviewed and evaluated for feasibility and impact, and vetted through standard IBM compliance processes. The selection process will include input from IBM’s experts across disciplines such as IBM Consulting, Research, Software, Chief Sustainability Office and Corporate Social Responsibility. The selection criteria will consider applicants' level of support to communities, the feasibility and sustainability of proposed technology solutions, and applicants' transparency on measurement and reporting, among other considerations.
IBM collaborates with organizations to design, develop, and deploy a technical solution directly benefiting communities. Throughout the experience, IBM provides access to platforms such as IBM watsonx and Granite AI models, IBM Cloud, IBM Environmental Intelligence and Red Hat open source technologies as well as technical mentorship to build long-term capacity. Organizations selected to participate must enter into an IBM grant agreement governing access to IBM technology, services and resources.
The IBM Sustainability Accelerator is open to nonprofit and government organizations globally.
IBM plans to select five organizations for this program each year.