UNESCO, ITU and Brazil's Anatel partner to set up an Artificial Intelligence Climate Institute, to be launched at COP31

3 November 2026

UNESCO, the International Telecommunication Union and Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency, Anatel, along with the Government of Brazil, have partnered to set up the Artificial Intelligence Climate Institute. The institute was announced at the COP30 climate conference and the partnership is now moving to full implementation. Anatel will host the institute's secretariat within its Green Digital Action Hub at Brasilia. The institute is meant to help developing countries design, deploy and govern their own ethical and resource-efficient artificial intelligence tools for climate work. UNESCO will base the curriculum on its 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and its Open Science framework. ITU brings telecommunications and digital infrastructure expertise through the ITU Academy and the AI Skills Coalition. The institute will run executive tracks on data governance and climate policy for public officials and hands-on engineering labs for local developers, and will keep an open repository of environmental datasets and climate model architectures suited to low-connectivity settings. It is to be formally launched at the COP31 climate conference at Antalya. A joint UNESCO-UCL study found that task-specific models and optimised prompts can cut artificial intelligence energy use by up to 90 per cent.