Planning: CRISES: CLAIM: The Center for Climate Leadership and AI-driven Integrity and Mitigation

This planning project aims to develop CLAIM: The Center for Climate Leadership and AI-driven Integrity and Mitigation, which seeks to investigate the societal, regulatory and governance implications of private sector climate commitments in the realm of generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI). The PI and team will lead efforts to demystify genAI’s role in climate information to enhance the credibility and integrity of climate actions by researching how it affects trust, policy support and individual behavior.

The center will generate education and training opportunities through pilot projects, represent underserved communities, and equip future leaders to navigate AI’s societal implications. More broadly, this project will support climate regulation by providing credible information, distinguishing reliable sources, unlocking new data to assess various actors’ climate impacts, and creating open-source datasets to address data gaps and benefit broader research.

Through an interdisciplinary collaboration that includes social scientists, computer scientists, law and policy experts, and practitioners from various sectors, the project activities will create safeguards, metrics, and institutions to effectively leverage AI for transparency and tracking of climate actions. The planning project focuses on three primary aims: (1) rigorously interrogating genAI models to address information; (2) designing new metrics and benchmarks to evaluate the accuracy and credibility of genAI information regarding climate commitments; and (3) convening specific projects to examine the societal impacts of genAI on corporate climate behavior and governance.

During the planning phase, this project will identify and convene stakeholders to conduct a comprehensive gap analysis, address key challenges, assess vulnerabilities, gather insights on real-world impacts, develop robust metrics for evaluating AI-generated content, review policy frameworks, and establish the center’s aims and flagship pilot projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.