The Data-Driven EnviroLab (DDL) is excited and honored to announce that The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has awarded our lab a $1 million grant to advance our work in improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) accountability. This funding will enable the expansion of DDL’s work through the Center for Climate Leadership and AI-driven Integrity in Mitigation (CLAIM), which aims to address misinformation and greenwashing in AI as well as the societal impacts of generative AI on corporate climate action.
The Data-Driven EnviroLab was previously awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Planning Grant as part of the Centers for Research and Innovation in Science, the Environment and Society (CRISES) program to plan for a research center that studies the societal, regulatory, and governance implications of generative AI as it relates to private sector climate commitments.
Our founder, Director Dr. Angel Hsu, has also been appointed to North Carolina’s AI Leadership Council, where she is working with other representatives to develop a roadmap for the state to pursue AI initiatives across a variety of domains, including education, workforce development, and health, while minimizing energy and climate impacts.
On the grant, Dr. Hsu shares,
“I am extremely grateful and honored to receive this support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. AI is developing at an incredibly rapid pace, and if we aren’t working just as fast to understand how it can both positively and negatively impact climate action in a credible way, then we risk locking ourselves into potential dangerous energy and resource-intensive pathways. It’s my hope that we can find responsible ways to use AI for our planet.”
Assessing AI’s intersectionality for credible climate action
Through a network of academics and practitioners, CLAIM will investigate generative AI (genAI) as a tool for scaling climate solutions, particularly for private and non-state entities. For example, CLAIM aims to research how large language model (LLM) chatbots can aid businesses and local actors in navigating complex scientific information to develop robust and credible decarbonization actions. The DDL has piloted two chatbots, ChatNetZero.ai and ChatNDC.org, to understand the strengths and limitations of LLMs to inform decarbonization efforts. Alongside proposed AI-enabled climate solutions, the need to understand the environmental and climate impacts of AI itself is another area CLAIM will tackle. CLAIM will also investigate how large tech companies account for the growing energy and water footprint of AI itself, as well as how user behavior impacts the overall energy consumption of AI.
For more information on DDL’s CLAIM project, please visit our project page.
