by Ariel Gilreath and Caroline Preston, The Hechinger Report
January 25, 2026
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I’m one of those rare people (there are others out there, right?) who have yet to try ChatGPT or any other generative artificial intelligence program. Part of my hesitation is driven by a vague concern that AI is killing the planet: Researchers predict, for example, that U.S. data centers could consume as much water as 10 million Americans and emit as much carbon as 10 million cars. At the same time, there’s hope that AI could combat climate change, by accelerating research on climate solutions.
So I was intrigued when I came across an announcement about a new initiative on how to teach K-12 educators to use AI with climate change in mind. The effort, called TEACH-AI, was started last fall by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Bremen in Germany. Among other projects, they are developing a course to help future educators understand how to use AI in an environmentally conscious way, and how to use it to teach lessons on climate change.
My colleague Ariel Gilreath, who covers K-12 education for Hechinger, spoke this week with one of the TEACH-AI creators, Asli Sezen-Barrie, an endowed chair of climate and environmental education and an associate professor at the School of Education at UC Irvine. Here is Ariel’s interview with Sezen-Barrie, edited for length and clarity.
— Caroline Preston
Can you explain the idea behind TEACH-AI, and how it came about?
Institutions have started a lot of initiatives around AI. At this point, it’s hard to basically say: ‘Don’t use this,’ because there are benefits that teachers and students see. So we thought, ‘OK, how do we have them think through the environmental cost of this?’
At the same time, we were trying to understand what is the confidence level and knowledge base that educators have right now, about not just commonly known tools like ChatGPT, but other AI tools developed for education purposes including to understand the changing climate.
What I started seeing is environmentally conscious teachers were actually a lot more cautious than what we initially thought. Even when their students were using it, they were concerned. Their districts are working on adopting certain tools, and these teachers were actually underlining a lot of reasons why not using AI is a good thing right now. We heard similar concerns from our colleagues in Germany.
What we thought then is: If their students are going to use it, if their districts are going to adopt AI tools, and teachers are really concerned, let’s try to figure out a way to understand how we can both use climate change as a context to see how AI can be used purposely — how do we choose the right tools, when the AI tool can align with our purposes — and then also create activities that teachers or their students will be able to use to debate what is the cost-benefit analysis for certain AI tools.
Is the purpose primarily to help future educators use AI to teach environmental lessons, or is it training educators how to use AI in a more sustainable way?
It’s going to be both. Because this is going to be one course, it’s exploratory work. My colleagues developed a tool called StoryAI, which has a specific goal and purpose and, as a result, lower energy cost. We’re going to see how we can leverage big data to store data with that tool on teaching issues like sustainable fashion or food waste or fires.
Given the amount of water and energy AI data centers use, there’s been a lot of debate about whether using AI at all is bad for the environment. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.
Those concerns are valid. But at this point, where I am, it’s hard for me to say: ‘It’s bad — period.’ Because there are valid reasons teachers will tell you they use it, like with overwhelming tasks. Climate change is such a complex topic. And we tell them to teach it in interdisciplinary ways, how communities care about it, what science says about it.
Maybe that’s where AI tools can support educators. It can be that they use AI tools to learn about changing climate and current data and research.
We need to think about what AI tools and what kind of use of AI will align successfully with the way we’re designing teaching and learning, and which ones will fail. We need to prepare educators on working through that judgment.
Part of this initiative involves designing a course that blends AI literacy with geography and environmental science education. What can teachers expect to learn from this course?
The course is called An Education for Sustainable Futures. We’re going to explore the two angles I mentioned: how AI tools have a role in understanding and making projections about climate change, and how do they support the solutions — or not, at times. The other component is bringing in AI literacy.
There’s a lot of professional master’s degrees appearing all over the country right now, and internationally as well. You don’t see so much discussion — or a course or even a curriculum element — on the environmental impact. Bias, language bias and reliance is discussed a little bit, but not from an environmental context.
And the class you described is just one part of this initiative.
We are also doing document analysis to look at guidance from California, Germany, UNESCO, to see where AI recommendations can align with environmental literacy.
Education can have a critical role in these discussions, because people make decisions, people vote for things. Not knowing and not understanding these things doesn’t give them informed actions.
Education’s role can be really critical to have these discussions and to learn to look at this kind of data.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected]. Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at [email protected].
This story about AI in education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s climate change newsletter.
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