Climate Change AI announces $1.8M grants program for research projects at the intersection of AI and climate change
The Climate Change AI Innovation Grants program will award up to $150K apiece to research projects that use AI to help mitigate, adapt to, or study climate change.
August 30, 2021 - Climate Change AI (CCAI), with the support of the Quadrature Climate Foundation and Schmidt Futures, is launching the Climate Change AI Innovation Grants program. The program will award a total of $1.8M (USD) in research grants, with up to $150K allocated per proposal. Funded projects will leverage AI or machine learning to address problems in climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, or climate science. Applications should be submitted by October 15th.
As detailed in CCAI’s foundational paper and on the organization’s website, AI and machine learning hold great promise for addressing climate change. The potential applications are numerous and diverse, encompassing energy, transportation, buildings, agriculture, land use, climate modeling, and disaster response. Yet the overall solutions pipeline from research to deployment has often been held back by a lack of data and other essential infrastructure, as well as by insufficient knowledge transfer between fields and sectors.
The CCAI Innovation Grants aim to spur research that addresses these challenges. The program will allocate grants to year-long research projects that apply AI to help study, mitigate, or adapt to climate change. For example, successful proposals might use machine learning to:
- Mitigate emissions in agriculture, buildings, manufacturing, power and energy systems, transportation, forestry, or other sectors.
- Help society adapt to climate change by better predicting, managing, and providing relief for disasters.
- Advance the study of climate, ecosystems, or other relevant natural systems.
- Accelerate development of low-carbon technologies such as electrofuels and carbon capture materials.
- Facilitate approaches in the behavioral and social sciences, climate finance and economics, climate justice, and climate policy that aim to support the climate transition more broadly.
Projects that address AI governance in the context of climate change or that assess the climate impacts of AI and its applications are also eligible for funding.
Each grantee must publish a documented dataset or simulator. If applicable, they must also publish trained models and/or detailed descriptions of model implementations. Projects are expected to result in scientific publications or other public dissemination of results, and should either result in deployed systems or include well-considered pathways to impactful deployment.
Lead applicants for this grant can be based at academic institutions in any OECD country. Applicants are additionally encouraged to build teams spanning multiple sectors, disciplines, and geographic regions (including, e.g., non-OECD countries and non-research institutions).
For further details on grant eligibility and how to apply, see https://climatechange.ai/calls/innovation_grants.
Media contact: Jesse Dunietz, press@climatechange.ai