{"id":139969,"date":"2025-11-18T14:52:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T14:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/139969\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T14:52:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T14:52:08","slug":"artificial-intelligence-sparks-debate-at-cop30-climate-talks-in-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/139969\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence sparks debate at COP30 climate talks in Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

BELEM, Brazil (AP) \u2014 At the U.N. climate talks<\/a> in Brazil, artificial intelligence is being cast as both a hero worthy of praise and a villain that needs policing.<\/p>\n

Tech companies and a handful of countries at the conference known as COP30 are promoting ways AI can help solve global warming, which is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels<\/a> like oil, gas and coal. They say the technology has the potential to do many things, from increasing the efficiency of electrical grids and helping farmers predict weather patterns to tracking deep-sea migratory species and designing infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather.<\/p>\n

Climate groups, however, are sounding the alarm about AI’s growing environmental impact, with its surging needs for electricity and water for powering searches and data centers. They say an AI boom without guardrails will only push the world farther off track from goals set by 2015 Paris Agreement<\/a> to slow global warming.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI right now is a completely unregulated beast around the world,\u201d said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Adam Elman, director of sustainability at Google, sees AI as \u201ca real enabler” and one that’s already making an impact.<\/p>\n

If both sides agree on anything, it’s that AI is here to stay.<\/p>\n

Michal Nachmany, founder of Climate Policy Radar, which runs AI tools that track issues like national climate plans and funds to help developing countries transition to green energies like solar and wind, said there is \u201cunbelievable interest\u201d in AI at COP30.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone is also a little bit scared,\u201d Nachmany said. \u201cThe potential is huge and the risks are huge as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rise of AI<\/a> is becoming a more common topic<\/a> at the United Nations<\/a> compared to a few years ago, according to Nitin Arora, who leads the Global Innovation Hub for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the framework for international climate negotiations.<\/p>\n

The hub was launched at COP26 in Glasgow<\/a> to promote ideas and solutions that can be deployed at scale, he said. So far, Arora said, those ideas have been dominated by AI.<\/p>\n

The Associated Press counted at least 24 sessions related to AI during the Brazil conference’s first week. They included AI helping neighboring cities share energy, AI-backed forest crime location predictions and a ceremony for the first AI for Climate Action Award \u2014 given to an AI project on water scarcity and climate variability in the Southeast Asian nation of Laos.<\/p>\n

Johannes Jacob, a data scientist with the German delegation, said a prototype app he is designing, called NegotiateCOP, can help countries with smaller delegations \u2014 like El Salvador, South Africa, Ivory Coast and a few in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations \u2014 process hundreds of official COP documents.<\/p>\n

The result is \u201cleveling the playing field in the negotiations,” he said.<\/p>\n

In a panel discussion, representatives from AI giants like Google<\/a> and Nvidia<\/a> spoke about how AI can solve issues facing the power sector. Elman with Google stressed the \u201cneed to do it responsibly” but declined to comment further.<\/p>\n

Nvidia’s head of sustainability, Josh Parker, called AI the \u201cbest resource any of us can have.”<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is so democratizing,” Parker said. \u201cIf you think about climate tech, climate change and all the sustainability challenges we\u2019re trying to solve here at COP, which one of those challenges would not be solved better and faster, with more intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Princess Abze Djigma from Burkina Faso called AI a \u201cbreakthrough in digitalization\u201d that she believes will be even more critical in the future.<\/p>\n

Bjorn-Soren Gigler, a senior digital and green transformation specialist with the European Commission, agreed but noted AI is \u201coften seen as a double-edge sword\u201d with both huge opportunities and ethical and environmental concerns.<\/p>\n

The training and deploying of AI models rely on power-hungry data centers that contribute to emissions because of the electricity needed. The International Energy Agency has tracked a boom in energy consumption and demand from data centers, especially in the U.S.<\/a><\/p>\n

Data centers accounted for around 1.5% of the world\u2019s electricity consumption in 2024, according to the IEA, which found that their electricity consumption has grown by around 12% per year since 2017, more than four times faster than the rate of total electricity consumption.<\/p>\n

The environmental impact from AI<\/a>, specifically the operations of data centers, also includes the consumption of large amounts of water in water-stressed states, according to Su with the Center for Biological Diversity, who has studied how the data center boom threatens U.S. climate goals.<\/p>\n

She said these operations will increase the national emissions of the U.S., historically the world\u2019s largest polluter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Environmental groups at COP30 are pushing for regulations to soften AI\u2019s environmental footprint, such as mandating public interest tests for proposed data centers and 100% on-site renewable energy at them.<\/p>\n

\u201cCOP can not only view AI as some type of techno solution, it has to understand the deep climate consequences,” Su said.<\/p>\n

Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein in Belem, Brazil, contributed to this report.<\/p>\n

The Associated Press\u2019 climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP\u2019s standards<\/a> for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org<\/a><\/p>\n

This story was produced as part of the 2025 Climate Change Media Partnership, a journalism fellowship organized by Internews\u2019 Earth Journalism Network and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BELEM, Brazil (AP) \u2014 At the U.N. climate talks in Brazil, artificial intelligence is being cast as both…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,1083,1477,19458,5563,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-139969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-brazil","tag-climate-change","tag-cop30","tag-environmental-impact","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}