COP31 Panel: Sustainable AI for the Planet and its People?

“Sustainable AI for the Planet and its People? Digital Governance, Leverages and Safeguards for the Climate Transformation”

Digital technologies and AI can help drive transformative climate and environmental action – but only if developed, deployed and scaled in a responsable, just and sustainable manner.

This COP31 side event, organized by the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES) and the German Environment Agency (UBA), will highlight governance initiatives and use cases demonstrating how sustainable digitalization can accelerate NDC implementation, align with climate goals and support the COP31 agenda.

It will feature high-level speakers, including from COP30 and COP31 presidencies, UNFCCC as well as scientific experts and UN partners.

Speakers 

• Dr. Veysel Selimoğlu, Head of Technology and Green Transition, Directorate of Climate Change. 
• Pedro Ivo Ferraz da Silva, Chair of the Technology Executive Committee & COP30 presidency team. 
• Dr. Somya Joshi, Research Director, Stockholm Environment Institute. 
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• Prof. Dr. Dirk Messner, President German Environment Agency (UBA) & CODES co-champion. 

Moderation: Dr. Marcel Dorsch, CODES Coordinator & Senior Researcher UBA.

Why this session, and why now? 

Artificial intelligence and the climate crisis are still being governed in two largely separate worlds. Yet their fates are linked like few other dynamics of this century. Digital technologies are widely seen as one of the strongest levers for transformative climate and environmental action, from optimising energy systems and early-warning services to enhanced NDC implementation capacities especially across the Global South. At the same time, the footprint of the digital transformation itself is growing rapidly: data centres are pushing up electricity and water demand, resource extraction and e-waste along the entire lifecycle are increasing, and the governance capacity of many states is trailing the pace of the technology and sheer power of Big Tech. Whether AI truly works "for the planet and its people" will therefore not be decided by the technologies themselves, but by their governance. The question mark in our title is deliberate. 

The governance landscape is moving faster than ever. COP30 in Belém anchored digital issues in the COP world for the first time as a cooperation platform, through the Green Digital Action Hub or the AI Climate Institute. The Turkish COP31 Presidency has tabled a political commitment on how AI should be designed, procured, powered, deployed, measured and managed in support of climate and development objectives: the Antalya Pledge on AI. In parallel, the UN system has created two new AI governance mechanisms: the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI (IISPAI) and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, whose first session took place in Geneva in July 2026. And in December 2025, the UN Environmental Assembly UNEA-7 passed a first of its kind resolution on Environmental Sustainability of AI Systems. 

What is still to be strengthened are the connections between these spaces. In the emerging AI governance architecture, the environmental and climate dimension still risks remaining a side issue, while the climate regime barely addresses the footprints of digital technologies. The two mega-transformations, sustainability and digitalisation, are being negotiated separately, although they can only be shaped productively together. This is precisely the window our session addresses: it brings together the COP30 and COP31 presidencies, the UNFCCC technology mechanism, critical science, UN development cooperation, and a national environment agency as co-champion of the global digital sustainability coalition CODES. 

Objectives of the panel discussion 

This session is not intended as another pure stocktaking exercise, but as a status assessment with a clear forward orientation. The overarching guiding question: 

Where does global governance stand today, and how must it evolve so that AI and the digital transformation become comprehensively sustainable and climate-just?

Specifically, the discussion pursues five objectives: 

1. Take stock: assess what the impulses from Belém (Green Digital Action Hub, AI Climate Institute) and Antalya (Antalya Pledge on AI, Technology and AI Day) deliver. 
2. Name governance gaps: where do climate, lifecycle perspectives and justice remain under-addressed in AI governance, and where does the climate regime lose sight of digital footprints? 
3. Build bridges: connect the process worlds, e.g. the UNFCCC technology mechanism, presidency initiatives, UNEA-7 resolution and the new UN AI architecture (IISPAI, Global Dialogue on AI Governance) – up to the UNSGs call for an AI Environmental Transparency Initiative. 
4. Keep implementation in view: what does sustainable digital development concretely look like in countries, and how can AI support NDC and SDG delivery without creating new dependencies? 
5. Secure follow-through: how can pledge and action processes this time be tracked beyond the conference itself (monitoring, reporting, accountability)? 

Intended outcome: participants leave the Pavilion with (a) a clear map of the relevant initiatives and their maturity, (b) three to five named governance gaps with concrete entry points, and (c) identified next steps towards 2027 and COP32 that CODES and its broad partners network can collaboratively pursue.