Climate Change AI Innovation Grants for Machine Learning Climate Mitigation Adaptation and Science

CIFAR and the Canadian AI Safety Institute fund Catalyst Project proposals addressing sociotechnical considerations in AI safety. The program supports interdisciplinary research in machine learning applications to science and society, with recent funded projects spanning misinformation combat, trustworthy language models, democratic alignment of AI systems, Indigenous AI governance, and real-world safety in autonomous systems. Designed to catalyze new research areas and collaborations at the intersection of social sciences, humanities, and AI safety.

The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation Data Practice Accelerator provides grants of up to $125,000 to nonprofits with complex datasets that are ready to deepen their data practice and build toward AI readiness. This program is distinct from the foundation's larger AI Fluency and Capacity Building grants ($100K-$750K) and focuses specifically on helping organizations develop the data infrastructure, skills, and practices needed to responsibly adopt AI tools. The accelerator supports organizations across the foundation's priority areas including climate action, health equity, economic solidarity, human rights, and crisis response. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis with a current deadline of July 1, 2026. The McGovern Foundation, with $1.6+ billion in assets and $75.8 million in FY2025 charitable spend, is one of the largest private funders of AI-for-good initiatives globally.

The Climate Change AI Innovation Grants program supports projects that address research and deployment challenges in climate change mitigation, adaptation, and climate science by leveraging AI and machine learning, while also creating publicly available datasets and tools to catalyze further work. The program enables key partnerships that accelerate the research-to-deployment cycle, creating synergies between academic researchers, nonprofits, startups and other companies, and governmental or intergovernmental organizations. Funded by the Quadrature Climate Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and Google DeepMind, with Future Earth serving as fiscal sponsor, this is one of the few dedicated grant programs specifically targeting the intersection of AI/ML and climate change. Projects typically involve climate modeling, weather prediction, emissions monitoring, energy optimization, biodiversity monitoring, and other environmental applications of machine learning. The 2026 competition opens with a full proposal deadline of September 15, 2026. The program has grown steadily since its inception, funding 23 projects to date across diverse climate domains and geographies.