When algorithms decide the climate

Researcher Diogo Guedes Vidal from the Societies and Environmental Sustainability Research Group at the Centre for Functional Ecology - Science for People & the Planet, TERRA Associate Laboratory, University of Coimbra, and its Extension at the Open University of Portugal, has just published an article in the prestigious journal PLOS Climate (Q1; IF 5.1) that poses a critical question: What if artificial intelligence has already become a decisive environmental actor?

Key insights:

• AI and digital platforms produce "environmental truth", determining what becomes visible, credible, and politically actionable
• Nearly half of AI-generated environmental news stories misrepresent their sources—not through malfunction, but because they are engineered to maximise engagement, not accuracy
• The Anthropocene is as much a crisis of meaning as it is an ecological crisis, making it essential to democratise the infrastructures that mediate our environmental understanding
• Disinformation is not an attack on truth, but rather the predictable outcome of systems optimised for attention

Read the full article (open access): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000799