Guest Editors: Mark Coeckelbergh, (Lead Guest Editor), University of Vienna, Leonie N. Bossert, University of Vienna, Leonie Mƶck, University of Vienna
Full CfP and Submission here: https://link.springer.com/journal/146/updates/27724060
Description
Humanity faces pressing socio-ecological crises such as biodiversity loss, pandemics, and climate change. Global and intergenerational consequences accompany all these crises. Technologies can play a major role in mitigating or exacerbating these crises, especially artificial intelligence (AI), which has anĀ ever-increasing impact around the world, making it one of the leading technologies of the Anthropocene. AI can contribute to one of the most pressing socio-ecological crises of our timeāclimate changeādue to its massive consumption of energy and water, as well as high CO2 emissions (Dodge et al. 2022, Strubell et al. 2019). However, it can also mitigate climate change by gathering and processing data on temperature change and CO2 emissions, transforming mobility systems to emit less, managing energy consumption, or nudging people toward more climate-friendly behavior. Therefore, how AI technologies are developed and used is closely connected to global governance and (climate) justice questions.
This link between AI and climate change, or sustainability more broadly, is attracting increasing attention within academia, politics, and the media, as is the debate onĀ which AI systems should or can be seen as sustainable (e.g., Brevini 2022, Coeckelbergh 2021, Hacker 2024, SƦtra 2021, van Wynsberghe 2021). While the question of whether, and if so, how AI should be developed and deployed to mitigate rather than fuel climate change is being investigated (Kaack et al. 2022), much more research is required, and many open research questions remain to be explored. We aim to contribute to these debates with a collection of critical investigations on āsustainable AIā and āAI for climate.ā We, therefore, invite contributions from various disciplines related to normative, epistemic, or policy and governance questions in the topicās context.
References
Brevini, B. (2022). Is AI good for the planet? Polity Press.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2021). AI for climate: Freedom, justice, and other ethical and political challenges. AI and Ethics, 1, 67ā72.
Dodge, J., Prewitt, T., Tachet des Combes, R., Odmark, E., Schwartz, R., Strubell, E., Luccioni, A. S., Smith, N. A., DeCario, N., & Buchanan, W. (2022). Measuring the carbon intensity of AI in cloud instances. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 1877ā1894.
Hacker, P. (2024). Sustainable AI regulation. Common Market Law Review, 61(2), 345 ā 386.
Kaack, L. H., Donti, P. L., Strubell, E., Kamiya, G., Creutzig, F., & Rolnick, D. (2022). Aligning artificial intelligence with climate change mitigation. Nature Climate Change, 12(6), 518ā527.
SƦtra, H. S. (2021). A framework for evaluating and disclosing the ESG related impacts of AI with the SDGs. Sustainability, 13, 8503.
Strubell, E., Ganesh, A., & McCallum, A. (2019). Energy and policy considerations for deep learning in NLP. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3645ā3650, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
van Wynsberghe, A. (2021). Sustainable AI: AI for sustainability and the sustainability of AI. AI and Ethics, 1-6, 213ā218.
Themes
This Topical Collection of AI & Society (AI&S) will expand critical scholarly research by introducing and investigating AI in a climate change and sustainability context. The aim of the special issue is to contribute to developing a vision for a new global governance framework for AI technologies andĀ to further the debate on which AI technologies can be seen as sustainable in a rigorous manner, finally aiming at providing thoughts on how AI can support societies to create both local and global transformations towards more sustainable and democraticāand, therefore, more justāfutures. We aim to collect articles for the collection that span from discussing the topic from a more general angle, e.g., by asking whether AI systems can ever be sustainable or whether it is the right tool to mitigate climate change and other socio-ecological crises, to articles that discuss concrete fields of application, such as, e.g., how AI can help transform societiesā mobility systems into more sustainable ones by providing means for smart and efficient use of energy, car availabilities, and traffic avoidance.
Other topics and themes will include, but are not limited to:
- How to use AI āfor climateā without interfering with peopleās autonomy in ways that are not acceptable in a democratic system,
- How to govern both AI and climate change at a global level, taking global and intergenerational justice and post-colonial perspectives into account,
- How to balance interests in mitigating climate change with potentially competing interests,
- How and whether climate-friendly AI applications should be regulated by law,
- How to use AI āfor climateā in a way that it also benefits non-human living beings,
- How to evaluate climate friendliness, or more generally sustainability, of AI systems,
- Non-Western philosophies and world views in (not) applying AI āfor climateā or in evaluating the sustainability of AI systems
Contribution Types
We welcome contributions across the following formats:
- Original papers/Research (max 10k words): substantial contribution, theory, method, application. Contributions may be experimental, based on case studies, or conceptual discussions of how AI systems affect organisations, society and humans. Original papers will be double blind peer-reviewed by two reviewers and the editorial team.
- Curmudgeon papers (max 1k words): short opinionated column on trends in technology, science and society, commenting on issues of concern to the research community and wider society. Whilst the drive for artificial intelligence promotes potential benefits to wider society, it also raises deep concerns of existential risk, thereby highlighting the need for an ongoing conversation between technology and society. At the core of Curmudgeon concern is the question: What are the political-philosophical concepts regarding the present sphere of AI technology? Curmudgeon articles will be reviewed by the Journal editors.
Important Dates
- Manuscript submission: 1st March 2025
- Notifications: 31st July 2025
- Revised papers due: 31st August 2025
Submission Formatting
You can find more information about formatting under the section āSubmission guidelinesā https://www.springer.com/journal/146.