Green Data & AI architecture · Climate-resilient agriculture
My name is Dunia Basciu, and I am a senior architect specializing in Data and AI. I design systems that take carbon footprints into account and use the same approach to collect data via sensors, with the goal of enhancing regenerative agriculture practices in the Mediterranean region to help plants become more resilient to the climate crisis, thanks to the insights gained from the data.
Founder of Google Cloud’s Sustainability by Design group · Founder of Net Zero Farming
What I do
for companies & startups
Carbon-aware cloud and data platforms, designed to be measured and reduce carbon footprint. Sustainability by Design, GreenOps, Green Data & AI principles, Data Mesh, carbon-footprint measurement and reporting — with GDPR, Data Governance and the EU AI Act built in, not bolted on.
for research & consortia
Turning soil, plants, weather conditions, and pollinators data — collected by local and remote sensors — into mitigation strategies for Mediterranean crops and beekeeping under conditions of heat, drought, heavy rain, and windstorms. Developed for European agricultural organizations and research consortia.
How I think
Most systems are made sustainable after they’re built. I design for it from the first architectural decisions — because the choices that shape a system’s footprint are made early - as well as data governance and security - and they’re costly to undo. This has always been my way of working. I call it Sustainability by Design.
You can’t reduce what you don’t account for. Measurement is the first step toward making decisions and taking action. Each system starts with a baseline carbon footprint value and is monitored transparently against that value.
Decouple storage from compute, design data products rather than just data pipelines, perform most heavy processes when a renewable energy mix is available, automatic right-size, choose serverless and efficient hardware, life cycle data management.
Data and AI managed by teams of domain expert that understand them, with GDPR, Data Governance and the EU AI Act embedded in the workflow rather than bolted on at the end.
Monthly reports help review processes that can be optimized. This is an iterative and fundamental task. Reducing emissions goes hand in hand with reducing costs. Measurement provides evidence.
The same method that makes a cloud platform carbon-aware is the one I now point at living systems to better know them. One discipline, two domains.
In practice from the land
A natural-language window onto a continuously refreshed knowledge graph — satellite imagery, local IoT sensors, weather, and farmers’ own records, labelled with the European CORINE Land Cover taxonomy. Domain-specialised retrieval returns only what matters: the soil and crop signals a grower can act on.
Data sources
The open-air lab
Where the data has roots.
My Sardinian farm is the testbed: native Mediterranean crops grown with regenerative agriculture and beekeeping, instrumented with local and remote sensors. We measure how crops and bees respond to extreme weather events — and here the bees themselves are climate sentinels.
↯ Cyclone Harry · 20 Jan 2026 In December we planted 3,000 young trees. In January, Cyclone Harry struck Sardinia — and thanks to regenerative practice, they held.
↯ Heat waves · from May 2026 Since May 2026, the western Mediterranean has been experiencing unusual heat waves. In Sardinia, temperatures are running 9 °C above the seasonal average. Plants are already showing signs of water-evaporation stress, and the decline in honey production is further evidence of this distress.
netzerofarming.eu ↗
Background
Networks
I work within Europe’s climate-innovation community — currently with EIT Food and Climate-KIC — building agri-food and climate-adaptation collaborations. More partnerships to follow.
Contact
