The fragility of our planet and the growing awareness of humanity’s impact on it have inspired collective action to reduce climate and environmental footprints through numerous global initiatives. Thanks to these efforts, emissions are slowing and even receding in parts of the world. However, it is essential to ensure that our future growth remain aligned with these environmental goals.

Digital and AI infrastructure is poised to become one of the defining infrastructures of the 21st century, complementing our other vital infrastructures : water, food, health, energy, and transport. Like the industrial revolution, AI technologies have the potential to reshape every facet of our economy. More importantly, they offer unprecedented opportunities to meet climate and environmental objectives by enabling deeper comprehension, analysis, and action on complex systems with a level of holism hitherto unattainable.

Recognizing that the environment and the digital and AI revolution are two defining challenges of our era, the Coalition for Sustainable AI was created to ensure these two forces work hand in hand, reinforcing one another.

Launched at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, this multistakeholder global initiative seeks to align AI development—spanning both hardware and software—with environmental considerations. Its mission is twofold: to prevent AI from exacerbating environmental harm and to harness its transformative power to accelerate the decarbonization of economies, reduce pollution, and protect our biodiversity, ecosystems and oceans.

The Coalition is united by this shared goal. We focus on:

• Identifying global AI initiatives for the environment to share best-practices, reach economy of scale, increase efficiency, promote faster adoption and achieve maximum impact.
• Supporting knowledge building, metrics, methods and tools to better report on the environmental impacts of AI and to lower those impacts. 

This agile and inclusive coalition welcomes new members who share its vision of creating a “green AI” legacy for future generations. Together, we aim to ensure that green AI becomes a powerful ally in addressing environmental challenges, leaving a sustainable and proud legacy for our children and grandchildren.

This Coalition is being initiated by France, in collaboration with the UN Environment Program (UNEP) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), with the support of several organizations. With the momentum of the Paris AI Action Summit, a number of companies, international organizations, research institutes and associations led and contributed to several initiatives. This highlighted the significance of sustainable AI as a crucial dimension of artificial intelligence, encompassing both its development and its applications. It also signaled the willingness of stakeholders to contribute and to collaborative initiatives, avoiding fragmentation and duplication of initiatives.

As a result, the necessity of forming a flexible coalition of stakeholders, united by a shared interest in addressing this topic, has been put forward. The goal of this Coalition is to make sure that the momentum will be continued for future events (AI Summits, COP and other international gatherings), with other national authorities and international organizations. This Coalition serves as a platform to identify stakeholders committed to the topic, and as a hub for giving visibility to open-ended, collaborative international initiatives pursuing the advance of science, standards and solutions for aligning AI and environmental goals.

The Coalition is articulated with the Coalition on Digital Environmental Sustainability, launched in 2021 with 8 co-champions.