Climate Change AI (CCAI) is a volunteer-driven organization, founded in June 2019 and incorporated as a US nonprofit in 2021, that works to catalyze impactful research and deployment at the intersection of machine learning and climate change. Its three co-founders are Priya Donti, Lynn Kaack, and David Rolnick, all researchers in machine learning and climate.
CCAI grew out of a widely read report, “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning,” released in 2019, which surveyed where ML could help across mitigation, adaptation, and climate science - from forecasting and grid optimization to materials discovery, remote sensing, and decision support. The organization runs the recurring “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning” workshops at major venues such as NeurIPS and ICLR, which became gathering points for the field, along with funding programs, educational resources, and summer schools.
The group’s stance is deliberately two-sided: it promotes ML applications that cut emissions or support climate adaptation while also pressing the community to account for AI’s own growing energy and carbon footprint. It has become the central convening body for researchers, engineers, and policymakers working on machine learning for climate.