The Data-Driven EnviroLab has received a planning grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to bring together collaborators to design a new center aimed at bolstering the integrity of climate commitments in the age of generative AI and its role in proliferating misinformation, disinformation and greenwashing.
The new Center for Climate Leadership and AI-driven Integrity (CLAIM) will investigate the societal, regulatory and governance implications of generative AI as it relates to private sector climate commitments.
To this aim, this project will engage stakeholders in academia, government, industry and non-governmental organizations for interdisciplinary collaboration.
CLAIM has three primary goals: First, it will rigorously test generative AI, large-language models and machine-learning models to address misinformation, disinformation and greenwashing. The center will also design metrics and benchmarks that can be used to evaluate the accuracy and credibility of generative AI information related to climate commitments. Finally, CLAIM will investigate the societal impacts of generative AI on corporate climate behaviors and actions.
Leveraging the expertise of computer scientists, social scientists, law and policy experts and practitioners from various sectors, CLAIM will be uniquely positioned to help answer urgent questions about the opportunities and dangers AI poses to the world of climate action policy. This project will engage a diverse team with collaborators from institutions including (but not limited to) Vanderbilt University, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, North Carolina A&T University, UN Climate Change, ClimateChangeAI, Arboretica, and more.
Generative AI has drawn significant attention over the past few years for the opportunities it presents in the fight against climate change. However, just as AI presents opportunities, it also poses threats to the transparency, credibility, and accuracy of climate commitments, especially private-sector climate commitments. In the status quo, without a clearly defined regulatory landscape relating to climate commitments, research initiatives like this are imperative to hold climate emitters to account.
The awarded grant will fund a year-long effort between the DDL team and collaborators to identify other key stakeholders, gather relevant data and research, design the center’s actionable ideas and plans and draft a comprehensive guide to CLAIM’s approach. Next year,DDL and collaborators will submit another grant to NSF to fund the continued implementation of CLAIM and its proposed solutions.
The NSF, in pursuit of its mission to build capacity to address compounding issues of national and global concern, provides funding for possible future Centers for Research and Innovation in Science, the Environment and Society (CRISES). The grant aims to fund research centers that will catalyze innovation on complex and compounding problems that face our society, including extreme weather, equity, sustainability, and more. CLAIM is one of the latest projects funded through an NSF CRISES grant.
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