Climate Action
COP30’s Rose-Tinted Vision for Artificial Intelligence
November 18, 2025
Have you ever asked Siri to tell you what the weather will be like later on in the day because you need to know if it is safe to plan a winter BBQ for your Mom’s surprise birthday party? Or to find the nearest grocery store selling that specific brand of vegan chicken nuggets that your kids love? Or to tell you in one sentence how Charles Darwin changed our understanding of the natural world?
Underneath your phone’s sleek, polished aluminum shell lies a world of information waiting to be explored, from the twisting jungles of Reddit and Tattle to the loneliest nooks of Google Scholar to the life and soul of the party that is Wikipedia.
With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), this world of information has just become even more complicated. AI has been heralded as a glorious future of amplified human innovation, a sort of digital demigod that one day soon, we will all come to rely on.
AI has the potential to be more transformative than electricity or fire.
Sundar Pichai, Google CEO
What Has This Got to Do With Environmentalism?
In the environmental sphere, one of the most urgent questions is how to weigh AI’s promise against its costs. Even as it devours water and electricity resources and often exploits workers in the Global South, some environmentalists believe the revolutionary technology can be used in the adaptation battle with climate change.
November 6, 2025 marked the beginning of the 30th annual United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP30) summit in Belém, Pará, Brazil, bringing together world leaders, scientists, non-governmental organizations, and civil society from around the world to address climate priorities.
Given COP30’s location in the Amazon, protecting the world’s forests will be central to discussions, highlighting their critical role in biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, and climate resilience. But this year’s other major agenda pillars include: transitioning energy and industry, stewarding biodiversity, transforming food systems, building climate resilience in urban areas, fostering human development, and leveraging cross-cutting accelerators like technology. One of these potential cross-cutting accelerators under examination is AI.
The AI Climate Academy, is a pre-conference workshop that aims to “bring together decision-makers from multiple sectors for an intensive immersion into the responsible uses of artificial intelligence to address climate change”. The Academy will gather a diverse group of decision-makers, governments, philanthropic foundations, NGOs, the private sector, and academia, for an intensive immersion centered around the responsible usage of AI to address climate change
Their workshops are aimed at building technical capacity and supporting local innovation in developing countries, to equip individuals and institutions with the knowledge and ability to use AI for climate equity. The curriculum is focused on how AI can be applied ethically, effectively, and with the end goal of mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis. The group’s results will be presented during COP30.
Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, says that AI could boost efficiency and human capacity rather than replacing it.
Most important is its power to drive real-world outcomes: managing microgrids, mapping climate risk, guiding resilient planning. This is just the beginning.
Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change
Can AI Help Us Manage The Climate Crisis?
AI can help make talking about climate change easier. Each year, COP negotiators are expected to juggle 120+ agenda items, hundreds if not thousands of hours of talks, and over 100,000 pages of submissions. On top of that, they must handle disagreements and conflicting priorities within their own teams or countries.
To combat this, Brazil’s COP30 Digital Support Project features Macaozinho, an AI assistant trained on thousands of UNFCCC documents and designed to provide reliable, science-based information without bias or misinformation.
Artificial intelligence offers something rare: the potential to level the playing field. It can enhance the capacity of underrepresented voices and make negotiations smarter and more inclusive.
Cecilia Njenga, Director of the UNFCCC Secretariat
AI can also help tackle the climate crisis by making extreme weather and disaster warnings faster, more accurate, and easier to understand, potentially saving lives and livelihoods in the process. Examples show how AI improves predictions not only about upcoming weather, but also about who and what will be most at risk. AI technology is playing a critical role in gathering and analyzing data to predict vulnerability and exposure risks, which may be especially important for data-scarce regions.
AI models aren’t perfect. Sometimes they can miss important details about specific communities or situations, even misinterpret or overlook case-specific nuances. For example, a flood prediction system might rely mostly on satellite data and assume that all neighborhoods have the same resources or vulnerabilities.
In reality, low-income or marginalized communities may live in areas more prone to flooding or lack the means to evacuate quickly. If AI ignores these differences, emergency responses could fail, either by neglecting these vulnerable groups or by over-allocating resources to areas that aren’t actually at the highest risk. This shows that AI needs careful design, local knowledge, and human oversight to make sure warnings and aid reach the people who need them most.
Challenges & Debates
But AI comes with environmental costs. It is well known that AI sucks up water and electric resources. In 2023, U.S. data centers used 17 billion gallons of water for cooling. That number is projected to increase to 34-68 billion gallons annually by 2028.
For local communities, heavy use of water by AI data centers can put pressure on local utilities. This can lead to higher utility bills for residents and less water available for everyday needs. Some companies, like Microsoft, are starting to use zero-water cooling systems that don’t drain local water supplies. But most companies still rely on traditional methods that use a lot of water, which can strain communities while supporting AI development.
Besides water, a University of Massachusetts Amherst study found that training a single AI model can emit 284,000+ kgs of CO2 — the equivalent lifetime CO2 emissions of five average American cars.
Workers are also facing serious challenges. In many parts of the Global South, people employed by AI tech companies spend long hours cleaning up algorithms and filtering harmful or obscene content—for wages that are often extremely low. Investigative reporters who visited these so-called “digital sweatshops” found workers earning as little as $1.46 an hour, while dealing with disturbing material day after day.
Content moderators are exposed to violent texts, images, and videos, which can take a heavy toll on their mental health, leading to depression, anxiety, or even strains on personal relationships.
“Basically, low-paid employees are having to look at the worst material that you can imagine, so that the rest of us don’t have to see it.
Billy Perrigo, TIME correspondent
Countries in the Global North, like Germany, the U.S., and the U.K. lead the AI readiness rankings and reap most of the benefits, the Global South often falls behind. The high costs of AI development—including labor exploitation and heavy use of environmental resources—are largely borne by the Global South, while the Global North enjoys the rewards. This unequal distribution of benefits and burdens is increasingly being described as AI colonialism.
What Can We Do?
We must think critically about the use of AI in our own lives. Though you may not sit among the COP30 delegates, you can still speak up. Most digital data centers continue to rely on fossil fuel instead of renewable energy. Make your voice heard and tell your lawmakers #RenewableEnergyNow.
If you’d like to learn more about AI and climate change, check out “The Double-Edged Sword of AI and the Battle Against Climate Misinformation.
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