AI Governance and Sustainability Transitions
Dr. Marco Tedesco, Lamont Research Professor at Columbia University, has been invited to participate in this Climate Week discussion on the shared challenges of AI governance and sustainability transitions.
AI is increasingly recognized as a powerful technology with significant opportunities and risks, yet there remains no settled approach for governing its rapidly evolving social, economic, political, and environmental impacts. This session moves beyond diagnosing the problem to ask a practical question: What should happen next?
Much of the current AI-governance debate focuses on distinct risks such as algorithmic bias, misinformation, and labor displacement. While essential, this approach can overlook a more fundamental challenge: how can societies govern a technology whose consequences may evolve more rapidly than the scientific evidence, public institutions, and regulatory capacity intended to oversee it?
The discussion will consider AI governance as inseparable from sustainability governance. This means looking beyond climate change alone to the wider societal transition involving energy, industry, labor, finance, and the information environments on which democratic decision-making depends. AI will influence whether these transitions are equitable, accountable, and successful and governing AI effectively is therefore a sustainability challenge in its own right.
Building on the report, AI and Sustainability Transitions, the event brings together perspectives from AI, sustainability, and governance to examine the institutional challenges these fields share and the need for closer dialogue among their respective communities.
The session will begin with a brief introduction to the report’s principal findings, followed by an interactive discussion and expert panel. Participants will be invited to contribute their perspectives and questions from the outset; these inputs will help shape the panel conversation and inform the continuing development of this work in collaboration with Hitachi. The event will conclude with audience questions and discussion.
