As a Policy Advisor, I’ve had the distinct opportunity to reflect on the critical discussions at the Hamburg Sustainability Conference on June 3, 2025. This pivotal session, focusing on “Responsible AI for the Planet,” delved into an urgent question: how can we manage AI’s growing environmental footprint and increasing demand to align it with our global climate and nature targets? Our distinguished panel – featuring Túlio Andrade, Achim Steiner, Luis Neves, and Bärbel Kofler, expertly moderated by Dirk Messner – provided invaluable insights into building strong partnerships and ensuring a sustainable future for the planet and its people.
A core concept underpinning our dialogue was the “twin transformation” – the deliberate integration of the sustainability transformation community with the AI and digital community. As Achim Steiner, Administrator of UNDP, emphasized, this is about shaping how technology is used, empowering us, and managing its inherent risks and downsides. The goal is not an either/or choice between technological advancement and environmental protection, but rather designing technologies and platforms that inherently minimize or mitigate their environmental footprint. This crucial perspective elevates the twin transition to the global agenda, a movement making significant progress.
However, the rapid acceleration of AI comes with a significant challenge: its environmental footprint. The AI revolution is exponential in nature, with data centers and supporting infrastructure demanding vast and exponentially growing amounts of energy. This raises a critical choice: either the tech sector becomes an ally in the energy transition, or it risks becoming a key obstacle to achieving our emission reduction targets and the temperature objectives of the Paris Agreement. Therefore, engaging the tech sector is paramount to ensure they invest in renewable energy and drive sustainable practices, rather than leaving a dramatic carbon footprint behind.
To address this, a fundamental approach is to ensure that the energy required for this technology is produced fossil-free and in a climate-sensitive manner. As Bärbel Kofler, Parliamentary State Secretary for Germany’s Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, highlighted, mitigation is a major topic, ensuring that the necessary energy is derived from renewable sources. This means focusing on “greening AI” and digital public infrastructures by aligning investments in these areas with the transition to a fossil-free energy system, whether for AI or everyday appliances.
Beyond its footprint, AI also offers unprecedented solutions for climate action. It can significantly increase the capacity of electricity grids by 20-40% through optimization, leveraging artificial intelligence and digital data processing. AI provides the crucial scale and speed needed for the deployment of climate-related solutions, both low-carbon and climate-resilient technologies – precisely what the IPCC indicates is necessary to win the climate fight. Luis Neves, CEO of GeSI, cited reports showing that while the digital industry’s footprint is growing, its enabling impact is far greater, with digital solutions potentially reducing 20% of global emissions.
Crucially, ensuring a truly responsible AI for the planet necessitates addressing the digital divide and fostering inclusiveness. As Kofler noted, there’s a significant gap in access to technology between rural and urban areas, north and south, rich and poor, and across genders. My ministry is actively working to close this divide and make new technology available to everyone. Furthermore, it’s vital to ensure that AI is trained on diverse data sets, not solely driven by American or Chinese languages or ideals, to overcome language and cultural barriers and prevent biases that could undermine democratic conversations or perpetuate inequalities.
A vital aspect of this twin transformation is a mindset shift and robust collaboration. Túlio Andrade, COP30 Chief Strategy and Alignment Officer, emphasized the need to merge the tech community’s “move fast and break things” approach with the climate community’s more precautionary mindset, to innovate quickly but thoughtfully. Luis Neves stressed the indispensable cooperation between the public and private sectors, and the necessity of different sectors working together, citing examples like AI optimizing water infrastructure for 30% energy reduction. This cross-sectoral collaboration is key to realizing the full potential of AI for sustainability.
Brazil’s upcoming COP30 presidency provides a powerful framework for this integration. Ambassador Túlio Andrade outlined three main objectives for COP30: strengthening multilateralism, connecting the climate process to people’s real lives, and accelerating the implementation of the Paris Agreement. For Brazil, the unification of climate and digital transitions is seen as the path towards the future, explicitly aiming to merge these into a single transformation for COP30. This demonstrates a clear intent to leverage AI as a mechanism to drive climate protection, acknowledging that this requires deliberate action, not just automatism.
Mobilizing adequate finance is another critical element. While multilateral development banks (MDBs) and initiatives like Just Energy Transition Partnerships play a crucial role in advising countries and providing financial means for transformation, the scale of investment needed is immense. Existing mechanisms, such as the voluntary carbon market, are insufficient to meet the financial demands. There’s an urgent need for more robust, non-voluntary financial mechanisms that can truly scale up investments in bioeconomy and climate initiatives, recognizing the multi-dimensional efforts required from various actors, including the UN, World Bank, MDBs, and bilateral cooperation.
The role of data and digital public infrastructure (DPI) emerged as a game-changer for international cooperation. As Andrade explained, DPI allows for the integration of different resources and data, connecting global frameworks to local communities. Furthermore, data itself can be more important than finance in protecting societies from extreme weather events and achieving efficiency gains. The non-rival nature of data – where its use in one community doesn’t diminish its availability for another – makes it a powerful tool for scaling solutions globally, as seen in initiatives like early warning systems.
However, successfully navigating this deep transformation requires addressing broader societal and geopolitical concerns. The “democracy crisis” in many societies, where significant portions of the population feel disengaged, translates into geopolitical shifts. Kofler highlighted how the way AI is trained and the data sets it analyzes directly impact the information it provides, potentially reinforcing biases or hindering respectful democratic conversations. Therefore, it is paramount to include data from all over the globe, incorporating local and indigenous knowledge, to ensure that AI reflects the equality of humankind and supports a broad range of experiences and opinions.
In conclusion, accelerating responsible AI for the planet is not just an aspiration but an urgent necessity. Luis Neves powerfully stated that if we want to solve the climate challenge, we need to bring the digital world to the table – “there is no other way”. While challenges remain, particularly in scaling existing solutions and fostering cooperation between the private sector and governments, the willingness and financial capacity from the tech industry are present. As Túlio Andrade summarized for COP30, it is an inflection point: we must recognize climate urgency, recover ancestral wisdom, foster cooperation and communication, and crucially, summon the future to come faster, but we must go together. By integrating AI purposefully and inclusively, we can indeed propel humanity towards a sustainable and equitable future.