Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming central to climate action—but it is doing so while largely overlooking biodiversity and ecological complexity. In early 2026, New Delhi hosted one of the largest global gatherings on AI: The India AI Impact Summit. Positioned as a defining moment in the global AI agenda, it brought together several people anchored around the principles of People, Planet, and Progress, advancing AI from economic development and tech advancement to climate action and sustainability. While this is a welcome shift from a purely technical domain to reflect climate resilience, disaster readiness, environmental monitoring, and efficient resource use, this rhetoric still does not explicitly include biodiversity and ecological complexity.
At India AI Impact Summit, the launch of the Google Center for Climate Technology in partnership with India’s Principal Scientific Adviser signals an important commitment to decarbonisation research, workforce development, and sustainable fuels innovation. The next evolution of such initiatives could lie in integrating biodiversity datasets, ecological indicators, and habitat-level risk mapping directly into AI-driven climate models. What climate-tech platforms increasingly need is ecological intelligence—the capacity to represent the complexity, interdependence, and spatial variability of living systems within AI research and deployment frameworks, rather than treating climate as a purely atmospheric or carbon problem.
Understanding biodiversity loss and data
Biodiversity and natural ecosystems play a central role in climate resilience. Along India’s coasts, for instance, mangrove forests act as natural buffers—absorbing storm surges, reducing erosion, and protecting vulnerable communities from extreme weather. From pollinator networks that sustain agriculture, to soil micro-organisms that regulate nutrient cycles, to intact river systems that maintain water security, biodiversity functions are foundational to climate adaptation and ecological stability.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024 ranks biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as the third most severe risk the world faces over the next decade. The UN warns of a “triple planetary crisis”, i.e., climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, while the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) estimates that up to one million species face extinction. Yet concerns over biodiversity collapse remain strikingly underwhelming in mainstream AI narratives.
Open-source tools such as Google’s SpeciesNet are helping conservationists analyse millions of camera-trap images in biodiversity-rich regions such as Tanzania and Colombia. However, many of these concerns remain largely confined to specialised wildlife and conservation science forums or academic conferences rather than embedded in core AI and climate innovation agendas.
Platforms like the Delhi Climate Innovation Week 2026, a convening space for collaborative climate action, cross-sector alliances, and scalable climate-tech solutions, place an emphasis that rests largely on decarbonisation, resilience, and system-level innovation. While these priorities are essential, such platforms do not consistently foreground deep ecological science or biodiversity as core design principles. As a result, climate technologies are often framed as mitigation tools rather than as instruments embedded within and accountable for the functioning of living ecosystems they aim to stabilise.
The success of AI in climate contexts depends on data, domain knowledge, and specialised ecological understanding that reflect this complexity. However, many AI summits and innovation agendas centre on scalable digital solutions without sufficiently integrating the subtleties of ecosystems, lifeforms, species interactions, ecological connectivity, genetic diversity, and the lived traditional, indigenous knowledge systems of people or conservation practitioners on the ground.
AI models that aim to forecast climate impacts, for instance, are only as reliable as the datasets they rely on—and ecological data remains deeply uneven and poorly represented for biodiverse regions. This data is often uninterpreted and neglected by decision-makers. Field ecologists working in biodiverse regions and natural ecosystems repeatedly encounter data gaps. Furthermore, biodiversity data from the so-called Global South remains more fragmented, underfunded, and under-digitised. A climate-AI agenda that prioritises data equity, investing in open, interoperable biodiversity datasets and capacity-building in biodiverse regions, would not only improve model robustness but also democratise ecological intelligence.
If biodiversity collapse is among the top global risks, then the next frontier of climate-AI innovation perhaps lies in embedding biodiversity into model design, data architecture, and deployment strategies.
Biodiversity data, from species distributions to habitat connectivity, requires multi-layered attention, contextual sensitivity, and continuous ground-truthing. These are precisely the kinds of knowledge systems that cannot be abstracted into generic AI pipelines. Even in frameworks that centre climate tech, biodiversity often remains a subtheme rather than a core pillar in its own right. The current, ongoing biodiversity crisis is a climate crisis—they are two sides of the same planetary emergency—and our narratives surrounding advancing technologies like AI must reflect that reality if we want climate solutions to be effective.
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What does greater inclusion look like?
The inclusion of biodiversity means building datasets that capture ecological processes and species behaviours, co-designed with conservation scientists and indigenous communities. It means incorporating ecological indicators into climate risk models rather than relegating them to separate conversations or niche conferences. It means recognising that conservation biology offers insights into resilience, adaptation, and long-term system dynamics that machine learning alone cannot generate.
Effective climate strategies increasingly depend on interdisciplinary actions—between data science, ecology, governance, and lived experience. If AI is to meaningfully contribute to climate resilience and sustainability, it must engage with biodiversity at a deeper level. Climate-intelligence models must blend satellite data, sensor networks, and community-generated observations to capture environmental dynamics at relevant spatial and temporal scales.
In calling for a more integrated approach, the goal is not to diminish the value of AI or innovation tech summits, but to strengthen them with biodiversity and local ecology narratives. The question is no longer whether we can model carbon trajectories, but whether we can model forests, rivers, sacred groves, amphibian breeding cycles, microhabitat connectivity, and trophic cascades with equal sophistication.
Responsible and impactful AI requires not only ethical guardrails and inclusive access, but also ecological intelligence and representation from field ecologists, naturalists, and conservation scientists. As global innovation and tech agendas evolve, the challenge—and opportunity—lies in ensuring that biodiversity is not an afterthought, but a central component of climate-AI partnerships.
The future of responsible AI will depend on ecological intelligence. Only then can we claim to build AI for climate that is truly responsible—and truly resilient.
Madhushri Mudke is a conservation scientist with a PhD in Conservation Sciences and Sustainability Studies. Her work focuses on biodiversity, species conservation, and climate-linked ecological change. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)