Brief Author Note

The past week has been hot and rainy over here in Cambodia! However, it’s summer hot all over the planet at the moment.

Northern India and Pakistan are dealing with temperatures soaring past 45°C (113F). The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has said that this year, the world experienced its 2nd-warmest month of May since records began.

Stay cool out there!

Chau,

Nate

Quick Links!

• Podcast Episodes

• Scientific Papers

• Policy Documents

• Multimedia

• Organizations

• Tools

• Fellowships Corner

• Submit Resources

Putting the AI in SustAInability (AI & Environment): The recent Sustainability Council webinar was an insightful and thought-provoking session led by Emma Herd, Partner at Ernst & Young’s Climate Change and Sustainability team and co-leader of EY’s Net-Zero Centre. The session tackled a highly relevant and timely topic: how emerging technologies like AI can be both a powerful tool and a complex challenge in the sustainability journey.

Nuclear Won’t Meet Tech’s Energy Demands (AI & Energy): Paris Marx is joined by MV Ramana to discuss the tech industry’s push to have nuclear energy power its data centers and why the reality of nuclear power isn’t as great as its promoters often make it seem.

How Tech Companies Could Shrink AI's Climate Footprint (AI & Environment): AI is rapidly transforming how we live, work, and communicate. But can we undergo that transformation without destroying the environment?

The Search for Squawk: Agile Modeling in Bioacoustics (AI & Ocean Conservation): This study presents a fast, scalable system for building bioacoustic recognizers in under an hour using pretrained bird acoustic embeddings, active learning, and efficient search enabling ecologists to analyze diverse ecosystems like coral reefs and endangered bird habitats with minimal data and expertise.

Can AI Grow Green? Evidence of an Inverted-U Curve Between AI, Energy Use, and Emissions (AI & Energy): This study identifies a "Green AI Kuznets curve," showing that while AI adoption initially increases energy use and emissions, it eventually leads to cleaner energy and lower emissions once per-capita AI investment surpasses a certain threshold, as seen in countries like Singapore and the U.S.

Techno-Neocolonialism: An Emerging Risk in the Artificial Intelligence Revolution (AI & Policy): This paper explores how the global AI revolution risks reinforcing historical patterns of dominance through “techno-neocolonialism,” calling for equitable, ethical, and inclusive collaboration frameworks to prevent exploitation of the Global South.

Policy Brief on Powering Europe's Digital Transformation: A Roadmap to Greener Data Centers (AI & Infrastructure): This policy brief discusses a roadmap to greener data centers on the European continent.

The Cambridge Handbook on Climate Litigation (AI & Climate): With over 2,500 climate-related cases filed worldwide, climate litigation is rapidly evolving but lacks a comprehensive resource for guiding judicial approaches. The Cambridge Handbook on Climate Litigation fills this void, offering an authoritative guide to climate litigation's complex landscape.

Balancing the Benefits of AI & the Health of Our Planet (AI & Sustainability): The Women’s Leadership Center at Williams Bay released its inaugural ‘Bold Ideas’ white paper, Balancing the Benefits of AI & the Health of Our Planet. The paper explores how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to enhance both operational efficiency and environmental sustainability.

Before Rivers Rise | Using AI to Make Global Flood Forecasts (AI & Water/Ocean Resources): Floods impact millions of people worldwide every year, causing devastation to homes, communities, and livelihoods. But what if we could predict them earlier and more accurately through FloodLabs, Google's newest AI tool for predicting flood events globally?

xAI Colossus Data Center Memphis Tennessee Video Recording (AI & Environmental Impact): This optical gas imaging video of the xAI Colossus Data Center in Memphis, Tennessee was recorded by certified optical gas imaging thermographer Sharon Wilson using a Teledyne FLIR G620 optical gas imaging instrument.

Water and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the Pacific Islands (AI & Water/Ocean Resources): Join us for a webinar about how water and AI are coming together for the Pacific Islands including the agritech community.

SWEEP (AI & ESG): Sweep is the sustainability data management platform. Its market-leading, AI-powered software helps organizations understand all extra-financial data across their business and value chain to manage increasing disclosure requirements and take action to meet sustainable business goals.

AI 4 Soil Health (AI & Agriculture): Helping the farmers and policy makers of tomorrow by providing new tools to measure soil health without laboratories.

Amini AI (AI & Data Centers/Hardware): We believe in our mission to build an environmental data infrastructure for Africa and the tropical belt to solve environmental data scarcity for countries in the global south.

Weather Lab (AI & Extreme Weather): An interactive platform sharing our AI weather models, including our new experimental cyclone prediction model. Weather Lab shows real-time cyclone predictions for traditional and AI weather models.

Green Metrics Tool (AI & Sustainability): The Green Metrics Tool is a free open-source (FOSS) tool we designed to enable developers best to measure the energy / CO2 consumption of software architectures.

Green Software Foundation Directory (AI & Sustainability): The one-stop platform for discovering and contributing to green software solutions. This project aims to build a trusted ecosystem of tools, libraries, and resources that promote sustainable software development practices and is a part of the Green Software Foundation (GSF).

AI for Climate Resilience Fellowship (Africa with multiple countries): Supports researchers using AI for climate adaptation and community resilience in Africa. 🗓️Deadline: June 30, 2025.

Amii Future Forged Research Fellowship (Canada BUT remote-friendly for research roles): Offers early-career researchers a funded path to explore responsible AI, climate, or health intersections. 🗓️ Deadline: June 26, 2025.

USC Health & Climate Reporting Fellowship (USA but hybrid and remote options available): Trains climate and health communicators to report on climate’s public health impacts. 🗓️ Deadline: September 3, 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 4th 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. 😆