Climateworks Centre welcomes the opportunity to make a submission to the Joint Select Committee on its inquiry into Artificial Intelligence (AI).

This submission speaks directly to paragraphs (a), (b) and (f) of the Committee’s terms of reference: the opportunities AI presents to lift Australia’s resilience, productivity and competitiveness; the opportunities for AI’s benefits to be spread across Australia’s suburbs and regions; and the importance of data sovereignty and the opportunities presented by narrow, domain-specific AI models trained on Australian data in areas of Australian sectoral expertise.

We raise one opportunity that sits squarely within that remit but is not yet part of the national conversation: the potential for AI to accelerate Australia’s climate transition, and the current absence of a coordinated plan to realise it.

Climateworks recommends the Committee’s report call on the government to develop a coordinated national plan to direct AI and advanced modelling toward accelerating decarbonisation across the economy – building on and extending the ambition of the National AI Plan.

Such a plan could:

• embed AI applications into Australia’s existing sector emissions reduction plans and national climate risk assessment framework, which has already identified 63 nationally significant risks – rather than treating this as a separate workstream
• strengthen collaboration between government agencies already applying AI to climate and energy challenges
• invest in the capacity of local and state governments, Indigenous and community organisations, research institutes, and regional and rural communities to apply AI tools to climate challenges and adaptation – ensuring the benefits of this capability reach beyond major cities and large technology firms.

More detail can be found in our submission [PDF 0.5 mb].