Proceedings of AAAI 2022 Fall Symposium: The Role of AI in Responding to Climate Challenges

TL;DR

This paper discusses the dual role of AI in climate change, highlighting its potential to support mitigation and adaptation efforts while also noting its environmental footprint and possible hindrances.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of AI's positive and negative impacts on climate action, emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration and policy considerations.

Findings

AI supports climate mitigation and adaptation applications.

AI's carbon footprint poses environmental challenges.

Collaboration across sectors is crucial for effective AI-driven climate solutions.

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, requiring rapid action across society. As artificial intelligence tools (AI) are rapidly deployed, it is therefore crucial to understand how they will impact climate action. On the one hand, AI can support applications in climate change mitigation (reducing or preventing greenhouse gas emissions), adaptation (preparing for the effects of a changing climate), and climate science. These applications have implications in areas ranging as widely as energy, agriculture, and finance. At the same time, AI is used in many ways that hinder climate action (e.g., by accelerating the use of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels). In addition, AI technologies have a carbon and energy footprint themselves. This symposium brought together participants from across academia, industry, government, and civil society to explore these intersections of AI with climate change, as well as how each of these sectors can contribute to solutions.