2025 Essays

How to avoid climate apartheid fueled by A.I.

Tedesco, Marco; Sathuluri, David

This commentary investigates the ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) is reconfiguring climate risk governance and resilience planning in New York City, revealing patterns that risk institutionalizing a form of “climate apartheid.” In this emerging landscape, affluent, data-rich districts attract disproportionate AI-driven investment in climate resilience, while historically marginalized neighborhoods experience heightened exposure to environmental hazards, pollution, and digital exclusion. Drawing on the stark disparity between the heavily protected infrastructures of Lower Manhattan and the under-resourced communities of the South Bronx, the authors analyze how AI-intensive climate finance, data center expansion, and opaque algorithmic risk models displace environmental and health burdens onto already overexposed populations. At the same time, they highlight emerging grassroots initiatives that repurpose AI for community-led solar energy, air-quality monitoring, flood prediction, and legal mobilization. The commentary argues that absent deliberate commitments to data equity, open-source and auditable AI systems, universal broadband access, interoperable public-interest data infrastructures, and equity-centered regulation of climate finance, AI technologies are poised to deepen rather than alleviate existing environmental and digital inequalities in urban climate governance.