Event: Climate-Responsible AI in Africa – Monitoring Environmental Impacts from Resource Extraction to Action

The NLP-CoP’s AI in Africa Working Group and the Climate Working Group invite you to our joint end-of-year meeting on November 25, 2025, at 10am ET / 4pm CET / 5pm CAT / 6pm EAT.

This event will explore the intersection of AI and various environmental aspects and how they are playing out on the continent. We’ll discuss global AI supply chains, African resource extraction, climate evaluation frameworks, and evidence-based decision-making. We’ll focus on how monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (MERL) practitioners can understand and address AI’s environmental impact throughout its lifecycle.

Since 2024, The MERL Tech Initiative has been involved in exploring how evaluators can strengthen evidence and learning to address the climate crisis. Building on discussions from a Bellagio Convening on Climate Evidence and Learning, and a resulting Invitation to Take Action, we’re hosting a focused conversation on AI’s environmental footprint in Africa. This matters now more than ever, as the global AI race intensifies and African countries work to regulate and govern AI development.

Our recent publication on Made in Africa AI approaches to MERL highlighted deeper concerns about extractive AI development. It emphasized the environmental costs of energy-intensive data centers, computational processes, and resource exploitation from conflict-affected regions.

This community meeting will focus on how African MERL practitioners can use existing climate monitoring and evaluation frameworks to assess AI’s sustainability and climate impacts in Africa.

Get to know the Speakers

• Professor Ian Goldman – Ian is President of the International Evaluation Academy, a M&E Specialist Advisor with the South African Presidency. He was Deputy Director General in the South African Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation until 2018, where he established and ran the National Evaluation System and was a founder of the Twende Mbele African Government M&;E Partnership. He was a 3ie Board member from 2012-22 and a SAMEA Board member from 2020-2023. He works with the CLEAR Evaluation Centres for Pakistan/Central Asia and Anglophone Africa, the latter at the University of Witwatersrand. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town, and an editor and author of the book Evidence Use in Policy and Practice: lessons from Africa.
• Adio Dinika – Dr. Adio-Adet Dinika is an AI researcher and political scientist whose work examines the intersection of artificial intelligence, labor, and power across the Global South. He contributes to the Data Workers Inquiry project at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). His research and writing trace how AI’s global supply chains, from African lithium and cobalt extraction to data annotation and content moderation, reproduce colonial patterns of exploitation under the guise of digital progress. Adio’s work bridges decolonial theory, worker inquiry, and ecological critique to reimagine just and sustainable AI futures.
• Madhuri Karak – Madhuri Karak (she/her) is founder of Beyond Carbon, a trans-local initiative that challenges dominant forest data infrastructures by centering community knowledges and multisensory storytelling. She is also an independent researcher working at the intersections of climate, technology, and people’s movements. For over a decade, Madhuri has collaborated with earth defenders, small-scale fishers and farmers, climate & environmental justice activists, and digital rights advocates to protect the commons and build collective power. As a consultant, she has partnered with organizations including Amnesty International, European Digital RIghts, and The Engine Room, analyzing the growing environmental impact of AI technologies and the parallel need for cross-sector solidarities. Madhuri was an American Council of Learned Societies-Mellon Public Fellow (2019-21) and holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Image by Goutham Krishna via Unsplash.