Brief Author Note

I have spent the past month working on a secret project and it is finally done!

It is a mini-policy tracker focusing on the water consumption aspect of data centers and AI in 5 countries including the U.S., Brazil, France, China, and Japan.

I used Airtable this time instead of Google Sheets since I am eventually going to migrate the AI & Environment Resource Hub to Airtable.

I also built a GPT assistant named Aqualex to deliver basic insights based on the uploaded database as a .csv file (note that you need a ChatGPT Plus subscription and you need to be logged in for it to work lol).

It’s a pretty powerful combination for policy users and database analysts in the future. Have fun and explore it if you want to!

Chau,

Nate

Quick Links!

• Podcast Episodes

• Scientific Papers

• Policy Documents

• Multimedia

• Organizations

• Tools

• Fellowships Corner

• Submit Resources

The Role of AI in Sustainable Transport (AI & Social/Economic Impacts): In this episode, Stephanie McLarty speaks with Rich Savoie, CEO of Adiona Tech, about the importance of sustainable logistics and the role of AI in optimizing transport emissions. They discuss a circular pilot project in Australia focused on recycling champagne corks and the challenges faced in the logistics of recycling. Rich shares insights on the significance of commercial transport emissions, the lessons learned from the pilot, and how AI can help improve supply chain efficiency.

Eliminating Food Waste with Nathan Fenner from Afresh (AI & Agriculture): In today’s episode, we learn about Afresh, a company that is leading the way in providing food waste solutions to grocers across America by creating optimized food orders through pioneering AI and machine learning solutions. You’ll hear from Afresh Co-Founder, Nathan Fenner, as we discuss the founding mission behind the company and how they are leveraging AI in a way that is fundamentally different from other established legacy companies in their field.

Talking Supply Chain: Schneider Electric’s Approach to the Modern Supply Chain (AI & Social/Economic Impacts): Resilience. Flexibility. AI. Workforce. We talk about these themes constantly, but few companies are as intentional in connecting the dots as Schneider Electric. Agustin Lopez Diaz, North American supply chain officer at Schneider Electric joined the Talking Supply Chain podcast to discuss Schneider Electric’s approach to its North American supply chain.

Green and Intelligent: The Role of AI in the Climate Transition (AI & Environment): This paper identifies five ways AI can support climate action and estimates that AI applications in power, food, and mobility sectors can significantly reduce global GHG emissions, potentially outweighing the emissions generated by AI-related data center operations.

Community Research Earth Digital Intelligence Twin: A Scalable Framework for AI-Driven Earth System Modeling (AI & Climate Science): The CREDIT framework from NCAR enables efficient development and deployment of AI-based numerical weather prediction models, with architectures like WXFormer and FuXi outperforming traditional forecasting systems like ECMWF’s IFS in both accuracy and computational efficiency.

Carbon-Aware Quality Adaptation for Energy-Intensive Services (AI & Data Centers/Hardware): This paper proposes a novel approach to reduce the carbon footprint of always-on, energy-intensive cloud services such as generative AI by dynamically adjusting service quality based on grid carbon intensity, using a forecast-based multi-horizon optimization method.

Using AI to Assess and Manage Environmental Risk: A Toolkit for the Public Sector (AI Policy & Governance): Read this report on how to use AI to assess and manage environmental risk for the public sector with this toolkit.

The EU AI Act and True Environmental Accountability (AI & Sustainability): Read this policy brief to attain a better understanding of how the EU AI Act and environmental accountability can be brought together in order to advance net-zero goals for the EU.

Advance AI with Cleaner Air and Healthier Outcomes (AI & Environmental Justice): Read this policy brief sprint as part of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) efforts to analyze the air quality and public health impacts of data centers and AI.

Can AI Be Green? (AI & Energy): This conversation dives into the growing conversation around Green AI, the movement to make artificial intelligence more energy-efficient, transparent, and aligned with climate goals. Together, they explore the hidden environmental costs of AI, the race to build bigger models, and the groundbreaking work of projects like DeepSeek.

Balancing AI Growth with Grid Flexibility: Inside EPRI’s DCFlex Initiative (AI & Energy): The rapid growth of AI is propelling us into a new era of innovation that has the potential to transform daily life and drive economic growth. In this episode of the EPRI Current, host Samantha Gilman is joined by David Porter, EPRI's VP of Electrification and Sustainable Energy Strategy, and Briana Kobor, Head of Energy Market Innovation at Google.

Bare Metal Documentary (AI & Digital & Cloud Sustainability): Microsoft, Google, META, and AWS are some of the biggest single-power consumers in the world. Along with other digital infrastructure companies’ consumption, they make up 2.4% of the world's energy use. This film details the digital infrastructure industry's work to reduce their carbon footprint in an effort to lower carbon emissions and help save the world.

Navitas Semiconductor (AI & Infrastructure): Next-generation, clean-energy power semiconductors supporting an efficient and sustainable future.

Revive & Restore (AI & Conservation Science): Revive & Restore is the leading conservation non-profit promoting the use of biotechnologies in conservation practice. The organization was formed in 2012 with the idea that 21st-century biotechnology can and should be used to increase genetic diversity, build disease resistance, facilitate adaptation, and more.

New Harvest (AI & Agriculture): Trusted, independent, and empirically driven non-profit building the field of cellular agriculture using AI to help in that regard.

Remap (AI & Geospatial Analysis): Remap is an online mapping platform for people with little technical background in remote sensing. We developed remap to enable you to quickly map and report the status of ecosystems, contributing to a global effort to assess all ecosystems on Earth under the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems.

EarthMap (AI & Geospatial Analysis): Earth Map is an innovative, free and open-source tool developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in the framework of the FAO - Google partnership. It was created to support countries, research institutes, farmers and members of the general public with internet access to monitor their land in an easy, integrated and multi-temporal manner.

Detectree (AI & Ecology/Biodiversity): DetecTree is a Pythonic library to perform semantic segmentation of aerial imagery into tree/non-tree pixels, following the methods of Yang et al. A pre-trained model is available at Hugging Face hub.

AI Governance Fellow (Washington D.C., East Coast Remote): The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) is seeking a Fellow with research and/or applied technical expertise on issues relating to the governance of artificial intelligence. The Fellow will contribute to the work of CDT’s AI Governance Lab, focused on the responsible design, testing, monitoring and regulation of AI systems. 🗓️ Deadline: July 2025.

2025-2026 Executive Fellowship (Global): Over the course of one year, fellows work at the frontiers of global transformation contributing to high-impact research, shaping strategic interventions, and collaborating with a global network of institutions redefining the future of governance, technology, finance, and sustainability . 🗓️ Deadline: July 31, 2025.

Research Fellow/Research Scholar (UK, US): Various opportunities with different lengths in the field of AI governance and safety with GovAI. 🗓️ Deadline: July 20, 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 6th 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. 😆