Deadline: April 15, 2027

Academic Editor(s): Giuliana Sorce (University of Tübingen)

• Submission of Abstracts: 1-15 April 2027
  
• Submission of Full Papers: 15-30 September 2027
  
• Publication of the Issue: January/June 2028
  

About the Issue

Our climate is changing and so are the ways we communicate. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made it to the center of public debate, emerging as a key actor for climate change and wider environmental communication. AI enters environmental publics twice over: as a material actor, whose supply chains and energy demands constitute ecological harms (Valdivia, 2025); and as a discursive actor, shaping how climate knowledge is produced, circulated, and processed.

While scholarship has begun to chart AI’s promise for climate action—from integrated systems that anticipate complex climate risk (Reichstein et al., 2025) to leveraging AI against the climate crisis (Cowls et al., 2023)—research on the communicative dimensions of this shift remains scarce. Importantly, promissory narratives of sustainable AI invoke participation while often foreclosing it (Zehner & Ullrich, 2025). Chatbots serve as first-line explainers of climate science, recommender systems curate what counts as an environmental problem, and environmental groups seek to harness AI on infrastructures they neither own nor control.

This thematic issue asks what changes when AI becomes a key public actor in environmental communication. It invites contributions across three key areas: the dynamics of environmental and technological change, the communicative conditions these dynamics produce, and the publics that form around them. Themes include, but are not limited to:

• Techno-solutionism, greenwashing, and the politics of “green AI”;
  
• Environmental (mis)information, synthetic media, and platform governance;
  
• AI-mediated climate journalism and science communication;
  
• Trust, risk, and emotion in AI adoption;
  
• Extraction, data centers, and computational infrastructure;
  
• Neocolonial narratives in AI for climate action;
  
• NGOs/social movements and democratic legitimacy in AI-shaped environmental publics.
  

The thematic issue welcomes conceptual, empirical, and methodological work and particularly encourages comparative perspectives and cases from marginalized contexts. Together, the issue shall investigate how environmental publics take shape with AI as a central actor.

References

Cowls, J., Tsamados, A., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2023). The AI gambit: Leveraging artificial intelligence to combat climate change—Opportunities, challenges, and recommendations. AI & Society, 38(1), 283–307. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01294-x

Reichstein, M., Benson, V., Blunk, J., Camps-Valls, G., Creutzig, F., Fearnley, C. J., Han, B., Kornhuber, K., Rahaman, N., Schölkopf, B., Tárraga, J. M., Vinuesa, R., Dall, K., Denzler, J., Frank, D., Martini, G., Nganga, N., Maddix, D. C., & Weldemariam, K. (2025). Early warning of complex climate risk with integrated artificial intelligence. Nature Communications, 16(1), Article 2564. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-57640-w

Valdivia, A. (2025). The supply chain capitalism of AI: A call to (re)think algorithmic harms and resistance through environmental lens. Information, Communication & Society, 28(12), 2118–2134. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2420021

Zehner, N., & Ullrich, A. (2025). Dreaming of AI: Environmental sustainability and the promise of participation. AI & Society, 40(4), 2605–2617. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-02011-0

Instructions for Authors

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Media and Communication is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

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