Brief Author Note

Lately, I have been thinking about how the environmental and AI landscape can feel like a bubble on LinkedIn.

I spend hours on a daily basis conducting market research, reaching out to people, and learning more about the different domains in the landscape from sustainable finance to conservation science.

Some colleagues of mine have pointed out that they feel like we are in a bubble on LinkedIn. We post all the time about the environmental impacts of AI, but it fails to diffuse into the real world.

Things might be changing with TIME magazine’s coverage of the air quality impacts of Elon Musk’s xAI data center facility in South Memphis, Tennessee.

Let’s see if the environmental impacts of AI becomes more common knowledge as we go further into 2025. However, the caveat is that I want the knowledge to go beyond energy and water impacts.

Chau,

Nate

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Sustainable Intelligence: How Green AI, Renewable Power, and Ethical Governance Can Curb Tech’s Carbon Footprint (AI & Data Centers/Hardware): This edition discusses the multifaceted issue of artificial intelligence's environmental impact and the emerging field of Green AI. They highlight concerns regarding the significant energy and water consumption of data centres, especially with the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and AI workloads. Proposed solutions include more efficient AI models like Small Language Models (SLMs), optimising coding practices, and developing sustainable data centre infrastructure such as underwater and liquid-cooled facilities powered by renewable energy sources.

Healthcare Sustainability: Aligning Health and Environmental Ethics (AI & Social/Economic Impacts): In this episode, Dr. Bryan Pilkington speaks with Kyle Tafuri, a healthcare sustainability expert, about the importance of aligning environmental sustainability with the mission of healthcare systems. Tafuri emphasizes that clean air, water, and healthy soil are fundamental to health and that healthcare institutions, as major employers and resource users, have both an ethical obligation and strategic opportunity to lead in sustainability.

Scaling Green Software with Anita Schüttler (AI & Data Centers/Hardware): What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software? To avoid checking just boxes? What is required to scale green software practices in a company? To discuss these issues, Gaël Duez welcomes Anita Schüttler on this episode “from the trenches”. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability.

A Deep Learning Model With Machine Vision System for Recognizing Type of the Food During the Food Consumption (AI & Agriculture): This study develops a machine vision and deep learning framework, optimized with EfficientNetB7 and the Lion optimizer, that accurately identifies consumed food products across 32 categories, achieving up to 100% classification accuracy and supporting sustainable food consumption goals.

Algorithmic Urban Greening for Thermal Resilience: AI-Optimised Tree Placement and Species Selection (AI & Ecology/Biodiversity): This study presents an AI-driven framework that uses Ant Colony Optimisation, species-specific thermal traits, and high-resolution climate simulations to strategically place and select urban trees, achieving significant reductions in extreme heat and improved thermal comfort at the neighbourhood scale.

DINOv3 and Self-Supervised Learning (AI & Data Centers/Hardware): DINOv3 is a scalable self-supervised vision foundation model that learns high-quality, versatile visual representations from diverse data without fine-tuning, outperforming specialized state-of-the-art approaches across a wide range of tasks.

Water Use in AI and Data Centers (AI & Water Resources): Explore this document detailing the water consumption problem with data centers in the UK with the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance.

Powering Data Centers Sustainably in an AI World (AI & Infrastructure): Data centers are getting bigger, denser, and more power-hungry than ever. The rapid emergence and growth of artificial intelligence (AI) is only serving to accelerate this process. However, AI could also be an enormously powerful tool to improve the energy efficiency of data centers, enabling them to operate far more sustainably than they do today.

Data Center Powering Report (AI & Infrastructure): All reports are backed by Sightline Climate data. Sightline Climate’s subscription intelligence product and expert research provides data, insights, and frameworks to help investors, corporates, and governments build and finance the new climate economy.

How Used EV Batteries Are Being Turned Into Data Centers To Power AI (AI & Energy): As demand for energy skyrockets amid the rise of AI, one of Tesla’s co-founders is betting on a new solution: giving old EV batteries a second life. JB Straubel, who helped launch Tesla and served as its CTO until 2019, founded Redwood Materials in 2017 to recycle batteries and build a closed-loop supply chain for electric vehicles. Now, Straubel is using EV batteries that still hold usable capacity for grid-scale energy storage.

Underwater Passive Acoustic Monitoring (UPAM) for Threatened Andean Water Frogs (AI & Biodiversity & Conservation): In their WILDLABS Awards 2024 project, Mauricio Sebastián Akmentins, María Soledad Gastón, Martín Boullhesen, Ariel Prieto, and Yanina Soledad Palomas Alaniz developed the first underwater passive acoustic monitoring (UPAM) programme to assess the conservation status and long-term population trends of Andean water frogs in Argentina.

Innovations That Matter By Deep Tech Startups (AI & Multiple Applications): What are the cutting-edge innovations emerging from the National University of Singapore that are transforming the nation and potentially the world? Find out in this five-part series that showcases how NUS’ faculty, researchers and students are tackling pressing challenges such as ageing and sustainability, putting AI to work in the real world, nurturing startups and uplifting communities in and beyond Singapore.

Hybrid Reef Solutions (AI & Ocean Science): Our mission is to develop innovative, nature-inspired technologies that restore and enhance underwater habitats, accelerating coral recovery and resilience in the face of climate change. By fusing expertise in nanoengineering, bioengineering, marine biology, and environmental engineering, we create nature-inspired solutions and biomimetic materials to restore and sustain marine ecosystems.

Wildflow (AI & Ocean Science): We empower humans to protect and restore Earth's vibrant ecosystems,­ like coral reefs,­ by harnessing AI to analyze petabytes of nature data,­ model complex ecosystem dynamics, and coordinate precise actions.

Nika (AI & Geospatial Analysis): Nika is a Spatial-Tech company based in Singapore. We provide geospatial platform and professional services to facilitate end-to-end decision making with advanced AI spatial technologies.

The AI & Global Health Hub (AI & Public Health): Essential insights and in-depth guides on AI for global health professionals, written & curated by Nate Miller.

USAI Government Website (AI & Workforce Development): Explore the new website dedicated to AI tools being used in the US federal government.

DINOv3 (AI & Geospatial Analysis): DINOv3: foundation models producing excellent dense features, outperforming SotA w/o fine-tuning. Explore on Hugging Face.

Climate Launch - AI for Climate Fellowship (Open to global applications): This fully virtual, equity-free accelerator is designed to support passionate early-stage AI-driven startups in India who are ready to scale their climate tech solutions. Over 3 months, you’ll receive expert guidance, tailored market support, access to valuable tools and credits, and a unique opportunity to pitch your vision to investors at Demo Day. Together, we are accelerating impactful AI innovations across energy, agriculture, water, waste, and beyond. We look forward to receiving your application and engaging with you! 🗓️ Deadline: September 12, 2025.

NVIDIA Graduate Fellowships Awards (Only open to PhD students): he NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program provides funding in the amount of up to $60,000 per award to PhD students who are researching topics that will lead to major advances in accelerated computing and its applications. NVIDIA particularly invites submissions from students pushing the envelope in artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and related fields. 🗓️ Deadline: September 2025.

Cohere Research Scholar Program (Remote so open to global applications?): The Cohere Labs Scholars Program is an 8-month, full-time research apprenticeship. The Scholars Program runs from January 12 - August 29, 2026. This program pairs aspiring machine learning researchers with an outstanding engineering team to collaborate on innovative machine learning research projects. The majority of our scholar projects this year focus on AI problems at scale, including efficiency, multilingual, safety, and more. 🗓️ Deadline: August 29, 2025.

If you have resources that you wish to submit to the AI & Environment Resource Hub, fill out the Google Form! Thank you for suggesting resources to add to the Resource Hub. 🙃 

That’s it for this week.

Thanks for reading the 13th issue of The Climate Code! It means a lot to me and we have more coming in the future, so definitely stick around! 🏃‍♂️💛

Nate

P.S.

New here? Check out the AI & Environment Resource Hub if you have no idea what it is. 😆