Our panel is titled “Harnessing the Power of AI to Assess and Mitigate the Impact of Climate Change.”
This first session brings together a Renewable Energy Research Centre in the Philippines, a Computer Science Data Centre in Indonesia, a community-led initiative on deployment and equity for marginalised communities in Asia, and myself, representing open education through several European-funded projects co-led by The Open University, including partners in Latin America.
It is a valuable opportunity for an intersectoral, interdisciplinary and intergenerational conversation. The audience is expected to include school students and facilitators from the Indonesian government. My contribution focuses on climate change science education.
Drawing on the CONNECT research programme, my talk examines where AI genuinely supports learning and action — and where it overpromises. Three conditions matter:
For students: genuine problems they care about, which activate their interests and competencies.
For teachers: genuine alignment with the national curriculum.
For communities: genuine partnerships built on participatory approaches.
I will illustrate this with three examples.
In Brazil, students and communities addressed the severe droughts affecting the Amazon rainforest. Together we mapped the effects of climate change and developed mitigation plans, working with the local secretary of education, indigenous and riverine communities, local and international researchers, and regional media.
In Greece, students used drones to capture images of forest fires and trained a classification system, coded in Scratch, to support forest protection. The project engaged families, national and local park teams, and environmental professionals.
In the United Kingdom, students used AI to design a fundraising campaign on energy efficiency — many drawn to the idea of solar panels for charging mobile phones. Using AI-generated visual maps, they explained energy transfer, coded the diagrams, and developed campaigns to persuade potential funders.
Integrating open schooling with AI in schools is not straightforward. It is complicated by epistemic beliefs that AI either overpromises or undersells, and by the misconception of learning as the memorisation of content. Used well, AI should do the opposite: deepen science capital, including students’ levels of interest and engagement.
Building AI climate tools responsibly. From a Responsible Research and Innovation perspective, the question is what it takes to develop these tools well, and how to widen access so that learners and educators are not left behind. Open schooling — a term coined by the European Commission in 2015, the same year as the Sustainable Development Goals, yet still not widely understood — refers to real-world problem-solving with multiple stakeholders: schools working alongside communities, universities, enterprises and local government. The aim is to align scientific innovation more closely with societal needs, while enabling learners across sectors to develop their capabilities as connected researchers, project coordinators and network leaders.
Governance and collaboration for open science. Drawing on UNESCO advisory work and large EU research networks, the final question is which governance and collaboration models genuinely work for open science and shared data. The literature on RRI, open science, ethics and integrity is substantial. It can be summarised in six components — open access, governance, gender equity, science and technology literacy, public engagement, and ethics — and eight features, organised in four pairs: diverse and inclusive; open and transparent; anticipative and reflective; responsive and adaptive. Across these projects, the most successful student work was consistently underpinned by democratic, participatory processes.