As climate change issues become more pressing, their impact in Africa calls for urgent, innovative solutions tailored to the continent's unique challenges. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) emerges as a critical and valuable tool for climate change adaptation and mitigation, its effectiveness and potential are contingent upon overcoming significant challenges such as data scarcity, infrastructure gaps, and limited local AI development. This position paper explores the role of AI in climate change adaptation and mitigation in Africa. It advocates for a collaborative approach to build capacity, develop open-source data repositories, and create context-aware, robust AI-driven climate solutions that are culturally and contextually relevant.

In the face of climate change-induced droughts, vulnerable regions encounter severe threats to food security, demanding urgent humanitarian assistance. This paper introduces a causal inference framework for the Horn of Africa, aiming to assess the impact of cash-based interventions on food crises. Our contributions encompass identifying causal relationships within the food security system, harmonizing a comprehensive database, and estimating the causal effect of humanitarian interventions on malnutrition. Our results revealed no significant effects, likely due to limited sample size, suboptimal data quality, and an imperfect causal graph resulting from our limited understanding of multidisciplinary systems like food security. This underscores the need to enhance data collection and refine causal models with domain experts for more effective future interventions and policies, improving transparency and accountability in humanitarian aid.

Meteorologists are aiming to use AI to help them get an edge in early detection and disaster relief in response to natural hazards and disasters, which according to scientists have become more frequent and unpredictable due to the impact of climate change. In response, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) together with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and UN Environment, have launched a Focus Group on AI for Natural Disaster Management, according to a recent account from MyITU. ITU scientists see that Al shows great potential to support data collection and monitoring, the reconstruction and forecasting of extreme events, and effective and accessible communication before and during a disaster. The ITU, founded in 1865 to facilitate international connectivity in communications networks, is today a UN specialized agency with 193 member countries and a membership of over 900 companies, universities, and international and regional organizations. The group recently held its first Focus Group on AI workshop meeting.

The United Nations Agencies are tackling natural disaster management using artificial intelligence (AI) with a new 2021 Focus Group on AI for Natural Disaster Management (FG-AI4NDM). The ITU focuses on information and communications technologies (ICT) and their support of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As noted by ITU, "facilitate international connectivity in communications networks, we allocate global radio spectrum and satellite orbits, develop the technical standards that ensure networks and technologies seamlessly interconnect, and strive to improve access to ICTs to underserved communities worldwide. Every time you make a phone call via the mobile, access the Internet or send an email, you are benefitting from the work of ITU." Relatable standards work would be in video compression (H26X series), phone area codes, performance standards in AI for healthcare, the phonetic alphabet used in radio communications, and the term "Internet of Things (IoT)" was originally coined by the ITU. As noted by WMO, "behaviour of the Earth's atmosphere, its interaction with the land and oceans, the weather and climate it produces, and the resulting distribution of water resources."