Welcome to the Climate AI Nordics Newsletter August 2025.

Since our launch in October 2024, the Climate AI Nordics network has grown to include 176 members across the Nordic region, along with 56 international affiliates who contribute to our shared interests. The network brings together researchers and practitioners working at the interface of artificial intelligence and climate challenges, including mitigation, adaptation, and monitoring.

If you know colleagues working in this space—across academia, public agencies, or industry—please let them know about Climate AI Nordics. 👉 climateainordics.com/join

In this issue, we share updates from our first nine months, including webinars, collaborations, and events. You’ll find a recent paper on neural networks for modeling atmospheric clusters, news from the newly launched TreeSense research center in Copenhagen, and a new section on job openings across the Nordic AI-climate community. As always, you can share your own work, events, or opportunities with us to include in future newsletters.

News

Featured paper: Bayesian Optimisation Against Climate Change: Applications and Benchmarks

2025-08-25 The featured paper this month shows how Bayesian optimisation can support climate change mitigation by tackling optimisation problems in renewable energy and environmental monitoring. This includes a review on applications across four main use cases—material discovery, wind farm layouts, optimal renewable control, and environmental monitoring, and the proposal of benchmark problems to guide future research. The work is connected to ongoing projects at Climate AI Nordics, such as efforts to design safer solar panel materials and improve air pollution monitoring.
(Read more)

Climate AI Nordics represented at AI+Environment Summit!

2025-08-14 Francesca Larosa, PhD, core team member at Climate AI Nordics, will be a session panelist at AI + Environment Summit Zurich in October! Be sure to check out this exciting event and its great lineup of speakers!
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Featured member

Featured member, August 2025: Miki Verma

2025-08-14 Miki is the Lead Data Scientist at Rewiring America, the leading U.S. nonprofit dedicated to the electrification of American homes. She develops data-driven tools, research, policy, and narratives to help facilitate households’ transition from fossil-fuel-powered to efficient electric systems. Her recent work includes leading the development of the Residential Electrification Model, a free API that predicts bill savings, emissions reductions, and energy impacts of electrification upgrades at any U.S. address.
(Read more)

Coming events

Debiasing AI predictions for causal inference without fresh ground truth data

Event date: 2025-08-28.

Webinar with Markus Pettersson, Chalmers University of Technology. Machine learning models trained on satellite imagery can predict household-level wealth with high accuracy, but their shrinkage toward the mean limits usefulness for policy evaluation. Two novel methods—linear calibration correction and Tweedie’s correction—reduce this bias without requiring new labeled data, operating directly on out-of-sample predictions. Experiments with Demographic and Health Survey data show that both approaches outperform existing methods, yielding more accurate and policy-relevant estimates in data-scarce settings.
(Read more)

Generative domain adaptation and foundation models for robust Earth observation

Event date: 2025-09-11.

Webinar with Georges Le Bellier, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. Deep learning for remote sensing is key to turning satellite and aerial imagery into real-world insights, but models must handle diverse sensors, environments, and conditions such as clouds and seasonal changes. The talk explores two approaches to building more robust algorithms: generative domain adaptation and geospatial foundation models. FlowEO will be presented as a generative method for unsupervised domain adaptation with high predictive accuracy across tasks, including post-disaster response and SAR-to-optical translation, without retraining the base model. The webinar will also cover PANGAEA, an evaluation protocol for geospatial foundation models that covers several datasets, modalities, and temporalities, comparing them with supervised baselines. PANGAEA highlights the strengths and weaknesses of GFMs, especially under limited annotations, and examines the role of multi-temporal data.
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Self-supervised pre-training for glacier calving front extraction from synthetic aperture radar imagery

Event date: 2025-10-23.

Webinar with Nora Gourmelon, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). Monitoring glacier calving fronts with SAR imagery is essential but challenging, as deep learning models often underperform due to limited labeled data and high variability. To address this, an unlabeled Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical dataset was compiled, enabling a novel multi-modal self-supervised pre-training strategy for a hybrid CNN-transformer model. Fine-tuning on the CaFFe benchmark showed clear improvements over non-pre-trained models, demonstrating the potential of data-efficient learning for calving front segmentation.
(Read more)

SWEO2025: Earth observation event in Stockholm

Event date: 2025-10-23 to 2025-10-24.

SWEO2025 is an event that revolves around the practical applications of Earth observation data, including within environmental monitoring and similar areas. The event takes place in Solna, Stockholm, between October 23rd and 24th. Click here for registration to the event.
(Read more)

Short Course on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Data

Event date: 2025-09-17 to 2025-09-18.

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Recent events

ESA Phi-Lab Sweden Opening Event

This event took place 2025-08-26. Welcome to the official opening of ESA Phi-Lab Sweden in Stockholm. The opening ceremony will take place on August 26, starting with a presentation of the Phi-Lab’s mission and thematic focus, followed by a symbolic ribbon-cutting ceremony. After a light lunch, the afternoon continues with a conference programme featuring inspiring presentations, forward-looking discussions, and a poster session for sharing contributions (pre-registration required). We welcome researchers, start-ups, industry players and the public sector to join this important step towards a future where Sweden plays an active role in shaping AI-driven space applications.
(Read more)

Norway launches six new AI research centers

This event took place 2025-08-26. The Norwegian government has announced six new national research centers for artificial intelligence, backed by over NOK 1 billion over five years. While their main missions range from education to robotics, creativity, and decision-making, sustainability, ethics, and environmental responsibility are important themes in several. Many PhD positions on relevant topics will be announced in the coming year. The centers will be presented in a public online event on August 26.
(Read more)

Job openings

Doctoral student in Water Resources Engineering with a focus on GeoAI and Remote Sensing in Hydrology

Lund University is hiring a doctoral student in water resources engineering with a focus on GeoAI and remote sensing in hydrology
(Read more)

Your news in the newsletter!

Make sure to share your work with us, by sending us an email (contact@climateainordics.com), posting in our Slack or some other channel, and we’ll add it to the news feed! Take the chance of showcasing your work or your events to the community!

Also be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and BlueSky. Climate AI Nordics will have the most impact if you repost and like our stories!

Climate AI Nordics is a network of researchers working to harness AI in tackling the climate crisis through both mitigation and adaptation.

We promote the development of AI-based tools and optimization methods that support sustainable decision-making—helping reduce emissions, restore ecosystems, and build climate resilience.