Climate Change AI Innovation Grant
Göttingen- April 29, 2026 Today, Climate Change AI announced awardees in its Innovation Grants program, which funds cross-sectoral teams tackling important climate challenges using AI algorithms. Climate Change AI is a nonprofit organization that has been critical to building the field of AI for climate. Its Innovation Grants program has become exceptionally competitive, with 12 projects selected this year from over 400 submissions from institutions in 78 countries.
Information about the project
In response to the growing risks that climate change poses to agriculture, the funded project examines whether machine vision can help small-scale farmers predict future income more accurately and strengthen household financial planning. Through a randomized controlled trial in Antioquia, Colombia, the project will evaluate whether promoting adoption of the Croppie App can increase farmers’ resilience to climate-related shocks. By providing low-cost estimates of coffee yields, Croppie can support earlier responses to anticipated income losses and help farmers adapt more effectively to changing climatic conditions. The project will also generate a unique dataset to assess the potential for scaling digital tools in low-income settings. In addition, regular crop monitoring will offer new insights into how climate affects coffee productivity and help identify the most vulnerable producers, thereby informing the targeting of extension services.
“We target especially catalytic projects,” explained Dr. Maria João Sousa, Executive Director of Climate Change AI, “On top of direct impacts, teams are expected to build critical datasets as a digital public good supporting further innovation, and to release open-source code.” Prof. Priya Donti of MIT, Co-Founder of Climate Change AI and one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, said: “In a time where people often think AI means large language models from massive tech companies, these projects show that on-the-ground impact often comes from completely different kinds of AI built by multi-stakeholder teams to match targeted societal needs.”
This round of the Climate Change AI Innovation Grants program was made possible thanks to the support of Quadrature Climate Foundation, Google DeepMind, the Global Methane Hub, and the Canada Hub of Future Earth.
Information about grantee
The Chair of Behavioral and Development Economics at the University of Göttingen, headed by Prof. Marcela Ibañez Díaz, studies how incentives, social norms, and institutions shape decision-making and development outcomes. Using experimental and field methods, the group conducts research on cooperation, discrimination, gender inequality, law compliance, risk coping, and women’s economic empowerment. Its work generates evidence on how policy can better address persistent social and economic inequalities and support more effective development interventions.
About Climate Change AI
Climate Change AI is a nonprofit that empowers a global community of innovators, practitioners, and decision-makers to accelerate responsible climate action through the use of AI, by addressing critical gaps in expertise, education, coordination, and research-to-deployment infrastructure. Since 2019, Climate Change AI has inspired, informed, and connected thousands of stakeholders across the academic, private, and public sectors through networking and knowledge-sharing events, summer schools and other educational programs, international policy reports, and global grants programs. Website, LinkedIn, BlueSky, Twitter
About the Innovation Grants program
The Climate Change AI Innovation Grants program supports projects that address research and deployment challenges in climate change mitigation, adaptation, and climate science by leveraging AI and machine learning, while also creating publicly available datasets and tools to catalyze further work. The program allocates grants typically of up to $150K for projects of one year in duration. So far, Climate Change AI has allocated $4.9 million USD in funding, including 33 projects over a broad range of application areas, with investigators from 97 institutions across 27 countries on 6 continents.
Contact:
Chair of Behavioral and Development Economics
Prof. Marcela Ibanez-Diaz, Mail: mibanez@uni-goettingen.de
https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/629106.html
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