Climate AI Nordics Newsletter, December 2025
Welcome to the December edition of the Climate AI Nordics Newsletter! Since launching in late 2024, our community has grown to 211 members dedicated to bridging the gap between AI and climate action. Help us expand our impact by inviting colleagues to join at climateainordics.com/join. Inside, you’ll find EurIPS highlights, 2026 workshop news, and new career opportunities.
News
Save the date: 2026 Nordic Workshop on AI for Climate Change
2025-12-16 Climate AI Nordics is thrilled to announce that our annual Nordic Workshop on AI for Climate Change returns again in 2026, this time in Copenhagen! Mark June 26th 2026 in your calendars, and stay tuned for more info to come!
Read more!
Reflections on the first EurIPS and a successful AICC workshop
2025-12-15 Climate AI Nordics joined the inaugural EurIPS conference in Copenhagen last week, connecting with the community at our booth shared with the Nordic AI Partnership and Pioneer Centre for AI. On Saturday, we successfully hosted the full-day AICC workshop, featuring an inspiring lineup of speakers and over 30 posters bridging machine learning and climate science. While the research highlights covered diverse topics like weather forecasting, a significant portion of the program focused on analyzing forests as vital carbon sinks and biodiversity havens. We are grateful to our partners and all amazing researchers from around Europe and the rest of the world for supporting this memorable week of collaboration, glögg, and impactful science.
Read more!
Featured work
Featured Paper: ForestFormer3D: A Unified Framework for End-to-End Segmentation of Forest LiDAR 3D Point Clouds
2025-12-15 The new Climate AI Nordics Featured Paper is “ForestFormer3D: Unified 3D Forest Segmentation from LiDAR”. This work introduces a transformer-based framework for accurate individual tree and semantic segmentation in complex forest environments.
Read more!
Featured member
Featured member, December 2025: Laura Ruotsalainen
2025-12-15 Laura Ruotsalainen is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and leads the Spatiotemporal Data Analysis research group. Her work focuses on developing machine learning methods for spatiotemporal data, particularly in reinforcement learning, representation learning, and uncertainty-aware models, motivated by challenges in climate, sustainability, and urban resilience. She also serves as Vice-Chair of the ELLIS Institute Finland and is a steering group member of the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI)
Read more!
Coming events
International Conference: Climate Impacts in a Changing World 2026
Event date: 2026-03-09 to 2026-03-11.
The Swedish Centre for Impacts of Climate Extremes (CLIMES) invites abstract submissions for the international conference Climate Impacts in a Changing World 2026, held in Uppsala on March 9–11, 2026. The event fosters interdisciplinary dialogue on the wide-ranging impacts of climate extremes on human and natural systems.
Read more!
SBDI Days 2026: Artificial Intelligence in Ecology and Biodiversity Research
Event date: 2026-02-10.
A conference hosted by SBDI in partnership with SciLifeLab’s Planetary Biology Strategic Area, exploring the transformative partnership between AI and biodiversity research.
Read more!
Recent events
TESSERA: precomputed FAIR global pixel embeddings for earth representation and analysis
This event took place 2025-12-11. Webinar with Zhengpeng (Frank) Feng, Cambridge. Petabytes of satellite Earth Observation (EO) data are freely available and can address critical global challenges. However, EO data quality is poor due to clouds and variable lighting conditions. To address this, practitioners typically use compositing, but this critically removes the temporal phenological signal. Moreover, supervised machine learning to map composited pixels to task-specific classes requires accurately labelled data that are rarely available. We present TESSERA, a pixel-oriented foundation model for EO time series that creates 128-dimensional latent embeddings requiring only a few labels for task-specific training to achieve state-of-the-art performance across diverse complex tasks. TESSERA uses two encoders that combine optical data with synthetic aperture radar backscatter coefficients at 10m resolution, creating embeddings fused with a multilayer perceptron to generate annual global embedding maps. TESSERA closely matches or outperforms state-of-the-art task-specific models and other foundation models across five diverse downstream tasks. It is unprecedented in ease of use, scale, and accuracy: no other open foundation model provides precomputed outputs with global, annual coverage at 10m resolution.
Workshop on Advances in Representation Learning for Earth Observation (REO) at EurIPS 2025
This event took place 2025-12-06. The REO workshop will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, Dec 6th. (Co-located with EurIPS)!
Workshop on AI for Climate and Conservation (AICC) at EurIPS 2025
This event took place 2025-12-06. Climate AI Nordics is excited to announce that the Workshop on AI for Climate and Conservation (AICC) has been accepted for EurIPS 2025! The AICC workshop will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, Dec 6th! (Co-located with EurIPS).
Job openings
Early-career computer scientist: AI tools for data extraction in sustainable development
Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) is seeking an early-career computer scientist to develop AI tools for data extraction and classification in sustainable development research. The role involves maintaining AI-driven pipelines, fine-tuning language models, and collaborating with multidisciplinary teams to integrate AI into evidence synthesis and policy-relevant projects.
Deadline: 2026-01-08
PhD position: Determining the utility of newly available hyperspectral satellite data to better understand and quantify biochemical and biophysical properties of tundra vegetation negatively impacted by changing climatic conditions.
University of Gothenburg is hiring a PhD student in Natural Sciences, specializing in Physical Geography. Project funded mainly be the Swedish National Space Agency.
Deadline: 2026-01-19
PhD position: Machine learning and passive acoustic monitoring of birds and bats in Swedish forests
The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences is hiring a PhD student within the Wallenberg Initiative in Forest Research (WIFORCE).
Deadline: 2026-02-10
PhD position: Data-driven insights of human adaptability to climate change
The IT University (ITU) of Copenhagen is hiring a PhD student within the project “ClimateAdapt: Human adaptability to climate change”, which is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
Deadline: 2026-01-11
PhD position in AI for biodiversity monitoring
Aarhus University is offering a PhD position on harnessing AI for biodiversity monitoring with camera trap networks.
Deadline: 2026-01-15
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.