Publication
Addressing climate change in the age of artificial intelligence: three registers of human rights struggles
In this article, Barrie Sander, Assistant Professor of International Law, elaborates some of the risks that arise from relying on AI technologies to address climate change and explores the extent to which human rights law may be harnessed to address such risks through three registers of human rights struggles – argumentative, aesthetic, and affective.
- Author
- Barrie Sander
- Date
- 15 July 2025
- Links
- Read the full article here
Amidst heightened hype in the capacity of AI technologies to address climate change, this article elaborates some of the risks and concerns that arise from AI technologies’ extractive climate consumptionism, deployment within climate mitigation and adaptation projects, entanglement in processes of climate securitisation, and contribution to the shaping of climate discourse.
The article then turns to explore the extent to which human rights law (HRL) may be harnessed to address risks and concerns at those intersections of AI and climate change across three registers of human rights struggles: HRL as an argumentative practice, encompassing the ways in which the criteria and standards of human rights frameworks may be relied upon to govern climate applications of AI; HRL as an aesthetic form, encompassing the ways in which the aesthetic features of the legal form of HRL may be relied upon to resist and disrupt multistakeholder forms of neoliberal governance at the intersection of climate change and AI; and HRL as an affective regime, encompassing the ways in which emotional discourses within human rights activism may influence how climate change is understood and the means by which it should be addressed. For each register, the article illustrates how HRL may be mobilised to address particular risks and concerns that arise at the intersection of climate change and AI, as well as the limits and challenges that may arise in practice.
Pervading the different registers in which human rights struggles are conducted is the importance of centring the needs and interests of the communities most and disproportionately impacted by the risks and burdens of climate applications of AI. With this in mind, the article concludes by emphasising that if HRL is to be oriented towards addressing the challenges that arise at the intersection of climate change and AI, it is crucial that the terms of human rights mobilisations are driven and informed by those communities.