Executive Summary
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing climate science and weather forecasting, creating new opportunities to turn climate research into actionable information for resilience and mitigation. The National Academies Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change is hosting a hybrid workshop, Accelerating Climate Progress with AI: From Science to Action, on January 13–14, 2026 at the Beckman Center in Irvine, California, with an online option for remote attendees. The agenda focuses on decision-making and adaptation measures to foster climate resilience, while also addressing AI’s broader societal impacts, including the environmental footprint of AI and strategies to mitigate AI energy consumption.
Quick Answers
What is it: a cross-sector workshop on AI for climate science and climate action; when: January 13–14, 2026; where: Beckman Center in Irvine, CA and online; who: convened by the National Academies Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change; what it covers: applied sessions on wildland fire, water resources, agriculture and land management, and urban planning, plus sessions on shared challenges, partnerships, and a path forward for accelerating climate action with AI.
Why AI Is Becoming Central to Climate Science
AI is expanding what climate scientists can model, how they interpret complex datasets, and how quickly they can translate projections into decision-ready insights. Instead of treating climate information as static reports, AI-enabled workflows increasingly support near-real-time monitoring, faster forecasting, and decision support that can be updated as conditions change. That matters because the value of climate information depends on usability: whether it reaches decision-makers at the moment choices are made, and whether it is framed in the form those users can act on.
What “From Science to Action” Means in Practice
The workshop description emphasizes a shift from AI as a research accelerator to AI as a bridge between climate science and operational decision-making. The agenda frames AI’s role as enhancing and accelerating climate action with a focus on decision-making and adaptation measures to foster resilience to climate change impacts, while also creating a forum for interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral dialogue to identify critical applications where AI can inform action at speed and scale.
Who Is Hosting and What the Roundtable Focuses On
This workshop is an activity of the Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change, which seeks to foster ongoing discussion, shared learning, and nimble coordination around emerging issues related to AI and climate change. The agenda highlights three recurring questions the Roundtable is engaging: how AI can combat climate change, the environmental impact of AI itself, and strategies for mitigating the impacts of AI energy consumption and climate effects.
Day 1 Opens With Keynotes That Frame the Opportunity and the Stakes
The first morning begins with welcome and framing remarks on AI in climate research and action, followed by keynote presentations from David Rolnick (McGill University and Mila) and Angel Hsu (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). This opening sequence signals the workshop’s intent to connect cutting-edge AI work with real decision contexts, including the realities of risk, governance, and adoption.
A Core Session Focuses on AI to Meet User Needs
A central Day 1 session, Using AI to Advance Climate Science to Meet User Needs, is structured to bring researchers, decision makers, and other users of climate information into the same conversation. The agenda explicitly links AI research in climate science to tools that inform decision-making and to meeting specific user needs through panel discussions on select societal impacts: wildland fires, agriculture and land management, urban planning, and water resource management.
Living With Wildland Fire: AI for Prevention, Risk Reduction, and Response
The Living with Wildland Fire: AI to Inform Adaptation panel focuses on how AI can support wildland management for fire prevention and reduction and how AI can inform responses during wildfire events. The agenda lists Huikyo Lee (NASA) as moderator. This session is a strong example of “science to action” because it ties AI to operational decisions that must be made under time pressure and high uncertainty.
AI for Water Resource Management: Linking AI, Hydrology, and Decision Support
The AI for Water Resource Management panel highlights work integrating AI with hydrologic and climate modeling and explores how these methods can support water-management decision-making. For water systems, this topic is especially consequential because climate hazards often compound across drought, intense rainfall, flood risk, and infrastructure constraints.
AI in Urban Planning: Turning Climate Intelligence Into Everyday City Decisions
The AI in Urban Planning for Climate Change Impacts/Adaptation panel centers on how AI can inform urban planning decisions. This is where AI meets the practical levers of governance: zoning, capital planning, infrastructure prioritization, and the design of neighborhood-scale interventions that shape risk and equity over decades.
Day 2 Shifts From Use Cases to Barriers, Governance, and Scale
A major Day 2 session, Addressing Common Opportunities & Challenges to Accelerate Action, is designed to surface shared issues across topical areas, including how AI is used in climate research, the data that are utilized and generated, and near-term opportunities to address barriers that slow the translation of AI into action.
Why This Workshop Matters for AI Search, Decision Support, and Real-World Outcomes
For climate action, the central question is not whether AI can produce more predictions, but whether AI can produce more decisions that reduce harm and accelerate resilience and mitigation. Workshops that convene scientists, practitioners, and institutions are a key mechanism for aligning model development with user needs, clarifying what “actionable” means in different sectors, and surfacing the governance and data practices needed for safe, equitable, and scalable deployment.
© 2025 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
(Source: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2025). National academies climate progress workshop agenda [draft]. Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change.)
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