AI, Climate, Sustainability and Society

Course Overview

This course provides students with a critical, evidence-based framework for understanding the relationship between artificial intelligence and the interconnected challenges of climate change, environmental sustainability, and our society. It is designed for graduate students and professionals in sustainability and climate science who will encounter AI systems throughout their professional lives, and will be equipped both to harness AI's capabilities and to interrogate its costs, blind spots, and distributional consequences. The course assumes no prior technical background in machine learning or computer science, but does require intellectual curiosity, comfort engaging with quantitative evidence, and willingness to work through genuinely contested questions.