Financial Technologies and the Environment

If you have heard of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, then you have probably heard of "fintech." These financial technologies are used across consumer and industrial spaces and are now being embraced by financial organizations with large global investments.

In parallel with the data and fintech revolutions are ongoing efforts at national, regional and global levels to reach the Sustainable Development Goals. Could these technologies, associated with concepts like observation, information, context and trust, be the tools we need to build a more sustainable and equitable world?

IISD and IISD Experimental Lakes Area are some of the first in Canada to explore how actors in the sustainable development world can adopt these financial technologies and apply them to sustainable development practices.

We are discovering existing adoptions, such as the City of Stockholm using IoT to monitor their water quality, to the Jefferson Project Lake George in New York State which is using IoT and AI to create a computing platform that captures and analyzes data from sensors tracking water quality and movement.

We then plan to work with IISD Experimental Lakes Area's unparalleled dataset to demonstrate the potential—and the challenges—of an AI-driven prediction on the physics, chemistry and biology of lakes and rivers.

This work is funded by RBC, who is working with partners like us to explore new and exciting technologies to solve the world’s pressing environmental challenges.