The program will back projects that help local communities adapt to a changing climate and build long-term resilience. This includes for example strengthening food security, enhancing health systems, and building coastal resilience in regions that are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts.

Funding Information

• Grants of up to $300,000 will be awarded to selected projects, alongside an opportunity to get access to a support network of mentors, training and community of practice.

Outcomes

• They aim to support projects that deliver on one or several of the following types of outcomes:
  • Harness and elevate local knowledge. Discern, organize, and analyze community insights to generate concise, actionable information accessible both to large-scale actors (e.g. governments, NGOs) and the very communities that contributed it.
  • Develop and demonstrate novel AI applications in real-world settings—such as smartphone-based AI advisers for smallholder farmers to enhance resilience, or AI-powered climate-risk assessments for low-lying islands to inform infrastructure planning and relocation strategies.
  • Improve and enhance adoption, cost-effectiveness or sustainability of existing AI solutions for climate adaptation and resilience, including advancing ecosystem-wide knowledge by contributing open datasets, benchmarks, or best-practice insights that benefit the broader AI-for-adaptation community.

Eligibility Criteria

• The basic requirements that a project or proposal must meet to be considered for funding, support, or participation:
  • Strategic alignment: The proposal addresses a concrete climate-impact challenge in line with the outlined focus for the call.
  • Implementation-focused: The team will adapt, localize, scale or otherwise deploy a concrete solution; no “research-only”.
  • Use of AI: The proposed use of AI has clear potential, is collaborative, and responsible. There should be a clear, compelling rationale for its use, demonstrating how AI directly contributes to addressing the project’s objectives. They also welcome early-stage applications from teams that need support in developing technical details further.
  • Geographic focus: The project is supporting underserved, climate-vulnerable communities in low- and middle-income countries.
  • Public-benefit purpose: The project must be committed to a public-benefit purpose, ensuring its outcomes primarily serve the public interest with tangible social and environmental benefits. For-profit entities must demonstrate how their project aligns with public-benefit goals and how they will ensure equitable outcomes that directly support local communities.

Ineligibility Criteria

• They don’t fund:
  • Short-term relief or emergency aid.
  • Pure research or proof-of-concept projects without a concrete plan for  field deployment or community adoption.
  • Projects focused solely on GHG emission reductions.
  • Service providers (e.g. platform hosts, MRV-tools) whose offerings do not directly improve community adaptation outcomes.
  • Projects lacking robust AI risk governance, i.e. without clear plans to anticipate and manage AI bias, errors, model drift, opacity, and trust issues.

For more information, visit Milkywire.