RAICA Foundation’s Post

 In our ever-changing world, climate literacy is becoming more important than ever. With the rise of generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there's an exciting opportunity for everyday people to deepen their understanding of climate issues. 🧠💡 A recent study explored how ChatGPT (both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) responds to climate change-related questions, comparing these responses with credible hazard risk indices. There’s a general sense of agreement and consistency in the answers, especially with GPT-4 showing fewer errors than GPT-3.5. This indicates that AI can be a valuable tool in enhancing climate literacy globally. This study proves that AI has the potential to be a game-changer in educating us about climate change. 🌱🌏 #ClimateLiteracy #AIForGood #SustainableFuture

Considering the growing importance of generative AI tools and their uptake by individuals worldwide, future studies on the combined topic of generative AI tools and climate literacy should commence with the ultimate goal of disseminating findings to enable informed, discerning use of ChatGPT and other increasingly popular generative AI platforms toward the pressing issue of climate change. #climate #generativeAI #climateliteracy

Chatbots can become valuable allies in the fight against climate change. Imagine them as friendly information kiosks, sparking initial conversations and providing clear, science-backed facts. This is particularly helpful for those who are comfortable interacting with chatbots. But it's important to keep in mind that chatbots are still being developed. Having in-depth conversations or looking at solutions with human specialists is still crucial. Consider chatbots as a starting point; they can be used to spark curiosity and direct users to reliable sources for more information. By ensuring accurate data and fostering a collaborative approach with human experts, chatbots can become powerful tools for raising awareness and empowering individuals to take action on climate change. #ClimateChange #ClimateAction #AI #Chatbots #ChatGPT

Effective transition to a sustainable economy requires robust emission reduction plans from companies, crucial for capital allocation and risk management. Transition disclosures serve as a market compass towards net-zero goals, mitigating financial risks. Despite various frameworks, inconsistencies persist, prompting a proposed set of 64 indicators for comprehensive assessment using natural language processing.

New article out I just published an article on a topic I care deeply about: Artificial Intelligence, Sustainability and Ethics. In it, I dive into the dilemmas and reflections surrounding the impact of this technology on our world. If you're also interested in AI and its implications, check it out and feel free to share your thoughts with me 😉 https://lnkd.in/dsbiDzF5

How can we make the AI transition fair and inclusive? Tackling climate change is not just about technology or finance; it’s fundamentally about people. For instance, in South Africa, coal-dependent communities are worried about their future, faced with unprecedented changes to their livelihoods and social cohesion. Here are some ways that we can ensure everyone is included: 1. Empowering through training and skilling Implementing a proactive strategy for economic diversification, along with livelihood support and skills training, can transform challenges into opportunities – particularly if communities are steering this change. This is what we call “distributive justice”: turning the downsides of major shifts into new opportunities for those who stand to lose the most. A similar principle could also be applied to artificial intelligence. Goldman Sachs warns that AI tools, such as ChatGPT, could replace nearly one-fifth of jobs worldwide. During previous cycles of autonomation, blue-collar workers lost their jobs. Now, white-collar workers, particularly women, are vulnerable, as AI excels at cognitive tasks, fundamental to office work. Following a distributive justice model, employees could be trained to manage AI systems, thereby boosting their productivity. A recent study with the Boston Consulting Group showed consultants using AI completed 12.2% more tasks, 25.1% faster, with 40% higher quality results than those without AI. The study also highlighted AI as a skill leveler, with the initially lowest-scoring consultants experiencing a 43% performance boost when using it. Currently, it’s estimated that only 1 in 8 workers globally have the necessary green skills, despite the sector's employment of over 67 million in 2022, and 90% of women lack these skills. Collaborative efforts from governments, industries, and educational institutions are essential to bridge this gap. Addressing AI skills development is key for distributive justice. 2. Ensuring inclusivity by hearing every voice This is what we got to witness in Secunda, and, more broadly, we work to ensure that communities are heard and are part of the designing of climate solutions like climate resilient infrastructure or extraction of green minerals. Moreover, AI and machine learning technologies can boost citizen engagement by rooting climate interventions in community experiences, and their use in climate finance directs funds to impactful projects, ensuring transparency and ‘green’ accountability. Researchers have uncovered instances of AI perpetuating algorithmic bias, such as facial recognition errors with certain racial and ethnic groups and AI resume-screening tools showing gender discrimination due to male-dominated training data. Addressing these issues calls for applying recognition justice principles. #theWorldbankgroup

AI can help address climate change — but some challenges to its use must still be overcome. Mention artificial intelligence and climate change in the same sentence, and discussion most often turns to the energy intensity of large language models — how much CPU power they require and how much carbon that emits. Priya Donti, an MIT professor and the co-founder and executive director of Climate Change AI, a global nonprofit, offers an alternative view. Donti said that not every application of AI requires immense amounts of energy. “There are a lot of models that can run on a laptop,” she pointed out. More important, AI has vast potential to accelerate the search for solutions to the climate crisis. Drawing from “Tackling Climate Change With Machine Learning,” a 2022 paper she co-authored with 21 fellow researchers, Donti highlighted ways in which AI is helping scientists and policymakers think through and address the challenge of climate change: • Gathering and analyzing data. • Forecasting. • Improving systems efficiency and predictive maintenance. • Facilitating the invention of next-generation technologies.

🔴 NEW WORKING PAPER: Combining AI and Domain Expertise to Assess Corporate Climate Transition Disclosures 🔴 📢 I'm really excited to announce this new working paper, the largest project I have been involved in during my young research career! In this paper, Chiara Colesanti Senni, Julia Bingler, Jingwei Ni, Markus Leippold, and I develop a novel expert-entric AI tool to automatically analyze companies' transition activities towards net zero. 📜 We proceed in three steps. First, we build common ground between 28 transition plan frameworks, discuss the results with over 50 experts, and identify 64 indicators. Second, we create an NLP tool to automatically assess company disclosures according to the indicators and validate it with experts from 26 institutions (regulators, supervisors, investors, etc.). Third, we deploy the tool on the disclosures of CA100+ companies, the most emitting companies in the world. 💡 In line with prior research and NGO work, we find that companies favor disclosing transition "talk" over "walk". However, we analyze 64 dimensions and also validate every step of the creation of the tool with experts. Thus, in this paper, there is much more to discover. 🔗 See here to read the paper: https://lnkd.in/dX7vHG4S ⏩ I'm really thankful for everyone who participated on the way. It was a huge effort but I also perceive it as a blueprint for how to take the expert into the loop of developing and validating new AI tools. The tool can help to steer effective engagement and help stakeholders understand companies on scale. University of Zurich - Department of Finance | Oxford Sustainable Finance Group | ETH Zürich #NLP #transition #disclosure #AI #LLM

If you could have a conversation today with your children as adults in the future, what different climate choices would you make? Can AI help us have those conversations? The article below doesn't relate to climate. Or children. But it got me thinking... Repeated research like the the work at Anthony Leiserowitz leads at Yale and the work of Potential Energy Coalition shows that protecting those we love from climate impacts is one of the key reasons for people taking action on climate. We know that writing letters to our children - like the work of DearTomorrow - is an effective way to generate policy support on climate. What technology like this use of AI to talk to ourselves as older adults enabled us to have a conversation with our children in their future? What difference would that make to decisions we make today? What difference would it make to decision makers if they first had to discuss policy choices with their future adult-children? https://lnkd.in/eJWq8iUv

AI can help address climate change — but some challenges to its use must still be overcome. Mention artificial intelligence and climate change in the same sentence, and discussion most often turns to the energy intensity of large language models — how much CPU power they require and how much carbon that emits. Priya Donti, an MIT professor and the co-founder and executive director of Climate Change AI, a global nonprofit, offers an alternative view. Donti said that not every application of AI requires immense amounts of energy. “There are a lot of models that can run on a laptop,” she pointed out. More important, AI has vast potential to accelerate the search for solutions to the climate crisis. Drawing from “Tackling Climate Change With Machine Learning,” a 2022 paper she co-authored with 21 fellow researchers, Donti highlighted ways in which AI is helping scientists and policymakers think through and address the challenge of climate change: • Gathering and analyzing data. • Forecasting. • Improving systems efficiency and predictive maintenance. • Facilitating the invention of next-generation technologies.