Professor Anthony Lieserowitz speaks during the “Climate Communication in the Age of AI” panel at Yale @ Climate Week 2026.
School of the Environment faculty shared insights on topics ranging from how we measure the wealth of nations to the role of AI in climate communication.
An economic yardstick that counts the goals a country scores but not the ones it gives up. News coverage that gives climate change just over half of 1% of its attention. Families who decide to stay again and again before climate impacts force them to move.
Yale School of the Environment faculty explored these ideas and more at Yale @ Climate Week NYC, hosted by Yale Planetary Solutions at the Yale Club on Sept. 22. Across panels on climate adaptation, natural resource economics, AI, climate migration, and urban wildlife, they challenged conventional wisdom and offered practical paths forward. Here are five takeaways.
For decades, the fight over cutting emissions has split Americans along party lines. Preparing for the floods, fires, and heat waves already arriving is a different story.
Jennifer Carman, director of Survey Strategy at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC), shared research on that divide during. “From Risk Awareness to Real-World Action: Aligning Climate Adaptation Policy with Public Demand.” Her team tested whether framing adaptation policies around “climate change” instead of “extreme weather” changed public support. Naming climate change cost some Republican support, but not much. “It’s a difference of 90% support versus 80% support,” she said. “It’s not, for example, a drop of 80% support to 20% support.”
Anthony Leiserowitz, the JoshAni-TomKat Professor of Climate Communication and director of YPCCC, moderated the panel. Adaptation, he said, “intersects with all the complexity of our societies.” His advice: “You’ve got to know your audience.”
It’s not ultimately about quality; it’s about quantity. We need to turn up the volume, not just play better.”
That is the aim of the IMPACT (Individuals' preferences for Measures and Policies to Adaptation to Climate Threats) Survey, which YPCCC previewed at the event. With the OECD, Intact Financial Corporation, and national governments, YPCCC will survey the public in 12 countries on their climate risk perceptions and the adaptation policies they support. Results are expected in May 2027, ahead of COP32.
“There are problems where GDP is really helpful. There are some problems where it’s really not helpful,” said Eli Fenichel, the Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics, during “Beyond GDP in Practice: Wealth Accounts for Sustainability, Competitiveness, and Climate.”
Sustainability, he argued, falls in the second group. When a country cuts down a forest or drains an aquifer, GDP counts the income it earns but not what it loses. Using an explanation given by the British economist Sir Partha Dasgupta several years ago, Fenichel compared it to “a soccer team that measures its outcome in a game only with goals for and ignores all the goals against.”
Those blind spots hurt most the people who depend most on nature. Panelist Valerie Hickey, director of the World Bank Group’s Environment Department, noted that three-quarters of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas. Their most important asset is natural capital, which goes uncounted in the accounts finance ministers use to make decisions.
Practical, theoretically grounded wealth-based indicators that track those assets already exist. The problem, as moderator Matthew Agarwala of the University of Sussex put it, is that the field assumed “if we build it, they will come. Well, we built it. … They didn’t come.”
Fenichel’s answer: stop adding indicators and start connecting the data behind them, so decision-makers can focus on a few key numbers and drill down when something looks wrong. AI, he added, can help by sorting and harmonizing that information.
“This is a boring plumbing problem,” Fenichel said, “which makes it solvable.”
Two upheavals are colliding. The climate crisis is bringing more extreme heat, wildfires, and floods. Generative AI is transforming how people find information, form beliefs, and make decisions. How the two collide will shape the world’s response to climate change.
Anthony Leiserowitz laid out those stakes as he opened “Climate Communication in the Age of AI,” a session YPCCC co-hosted with the Potential Energy Coalition. For climate communicators, the question is no longer whether AI will reshape the field. “It already has,” he said. “The question is how we use it wisely.”
His own research offers an example. Leiserowitz and colleagues used AI to analyze 6.4 million articles published by five major U.S. news outlets between 1984 and 2025, a job far too big for human coders alone. They found that climate change made up just over half of 1% of all coverage.
Leiserowitz has spent 30 years studying how to tell the climate story better, from finding the right messenger to reaching the right audience. But the numbers point to something the field has overlooked. “It’s not ultimately about quality; it’s about quantity,” he said. Borrowing from This Is Spinal Tap, whose amplifiers famously go to 11, he noted that the volume on climate has barely moved off the bottom. “We need to turn up the volume, not just play better.”
His fellow panelists argued that AI can help do exactly that. Eric Asche, CEO of the Potential Energy Coalition, said the fight over how a disaster is explained is often won or lost in its first few hours, far faster than traditional campaigns can respond. Michael Treff, CEO of Code and Theory, said AI has cut the time it takes to produce campaign content from months to minutes.
We tend to picture climate migration as a single dramatic moment: a flood hits, a drought sets in, and people flee. The reality is slower and harder to see.
Biweekly, we highlight three news and research stories about the work we’re doing at Yale School of the Environment.
Brianna Castro, assistant professor of Urban Sustainability, has spent years following families in Colombia, Nigeria, and the United States as they decide whether to stay or go. She shared what she has learned on “Toxic Intersections of Migration Law and Climate Policy,” a panel opened by Michael Gelobter, executive director of the Yale Center for Environmental Justice.
Most climate migration happens over short distances and within national borders, Castro noted. “Turns out it’s really hard to move a long way,” she said. That means it isn’t only happening in faraway places. There is “quite a bit of mobility and climate migration occurring in the global north and within the U.S. as well.”
Moving is rarely a single decision. “Every time a household decides to stay in a crisis, they invest resources in doing that,” Castro said. That might mean seeds for another harvest or repairs after a flood. Each investment drains the savings a family would need to relocate. “The longer climate impacts go on, the harder it becomes to move.”
That’s why Castro sees early, temporary moves as a form of adaptation. A household might send one member away to find work and send money home, so the rest of the family can stay. Those who hold on until their resources run out face distress migration, leaving because “they’ve run out of options in the place where they are.”
Policy can help. Castro followed one family in Colombia that moved again and again, chasing rainfall to grow their crops. After four years, their young daughter was still in first grade, because local schools admitted new students only at the start of the school year. Letting children enroll at any point in the year, Castro said, would better support families on the move.
More than 80% of the world's people live in cities and towns, and so does a surprising amount of wildlife. Cities that aren't designed for people and wildlife to live together fail more than biodiversity. They fail most of the population. Gabriel Gadsden '26 PhD, an urban wildlife researcher and Thomas Lovejoy Conservation Fellow, opened "Creatures of Change: Multi-Species Urbanism" with that challenge.
Nyeema Harris, the Knobloch Family Associate Professor of Wildlife and Land Conservation, has spent the last decade monitoring wildlife across Detroit with motion-activated cameras. Wildlife, she said, is constantly figuring out what it takes to survive. The harder question is whether people will change, too.
Part of the challenge is perception. Films and even children's animation often cast predators as villains, Harris noted. Her cameras reveal a more complicated picture, including a dog chasing a coyote and dogs carrying opossums in their mouths. "The idea of coexistence is not devoid of conflict," she said.
Harris has also brought Detroit middle schoolers into her research, helping them build empathy for the animals in their neighborhoods. Still, empathy is only a start. "It's one thing to change attitudes," Harris said. "I think it's a different thing to change behaviors." People already track their carbon and ecological footprints, and she discussed the idea of adding a "stewardship metric" for how we treat the land and the wildlife that share it.
