Causal AI: Solution or Obstacle for Climate Action?
Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing research, education, and business, unlocking unprecedented opportunities across climate, health, and beyond. In our lab, we’re developing the first foundation model for healthy climate adaptation, pre-trained on the complete US Medicare dataset and enriched with nationwide Census, weather, and pollution data. This model enables powerful “what-if” scenario forecasting, using synthetic ground-truth data to validate counterfactual predictions and guide impactful climate actions.
Yet, this AI-driven progress comes at a cost: energy-hungry data centers power these advances, raising concerns about their environmental footprint and the paradox of AI’s growing electricity demand in a world striving to reduce fossil fuel reliance. In this talk, I’ll share insights from our work and explore AI’s uncertain, double-edged role in the fight against climate change.
Francesca Dominici
Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Director at the Harvard Data Science Initiative
Dr. Francesca Dominici is the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative at Harvard University.
She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the International Society of Mathematical Statistics. In 2024, she was named by TIME100 Health as one of the most influential scientists in global health in the world.
Before being appointed founding director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, she was senior associate dean for research at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Dominici is also the founder and principal investigator (PI) for the National Studies on Air Pollution and Health Group (NSAPH), a multi-disciplinary group of faculty postdoctoral fellows from several academic institutions that rely on harmonized data assets to advance research on climate and AI. She is also one of the principal investigators of the only national research coordinating center on climate and health funded by the National Institute of Health.