Hey CATs,

Welcome to issue 322 of the ClimateAction.tech (CAT) Newsletter - your weekly summary of what's happening inside the CAT Slack community (join here and check out our onboarding checklist), and in the wider world of climate and tech.

Remember you can unsubscribe from this newsletter at any time - the link is at the bottom.

Stay curious 😌💚🐱

CAT Community News

Help shape how CATs tech and Slack community evolve

We’re looking for new CAT organisers to join us! These two roles come with a 1 year commitment and a workload of about 4 hours per week.

⚙️ Tech organiser - What you do: Maintain and improve our tech infrastructure including our website, GSuite, newsletter, and other digital tools (full role description)

Apply or nominate someone here

🫶 Community organiser - What you do: Set a strategy and direction for how our members experience our community on Slack in chats and channels (full role description)

Apply or nominate someone here

What's in it for you: Experience with leadership, automation, and volunteer management. A place of freedom to try and do things better than you might do them at work. Volunteering with a lovely team for a climate-focussed community.

▶️ Catch up on recent CAT events

If you've missed our Town Hall where we talked about upcoming CAT projects you can help with, you can rewatch it through this link (Passcode: fSVrz5*6)

If you've missed the last Responsible AI series event titled "Values-Driven Risk Assessment Matters in AI Development", you can rewatch it here and join the conversation in the same thread.

🗳️ Have your say

If you haven't done so yet, please take 10mins to fill out the CAT Canon Survey which will help us define the positions that CAT takes on climate solutions.

📍 From the #local channels

• Folks are looking to connect in #local-new-england and #local-pittsburgh
• The next permacomputing meetup (on Jul 12) was shared in #local-austria
• In #local-london CATs will be reflecting on London Climate Action Week

📅 CAT events (see all)

Wed, Jul 8 - What I Know About Local Language Models: Evan Hahn shares a practical guide to running AI locally (part of the Responsible AI Series)

🍩 Community networking

Every 2 weeks, we match 2-3 CATs so you can connect over a quick 30-minute call. Join #cat-roulette, pick your region and wait for a message from Donut. The next round of matches will go out on Fri, July 3rd. More info

Media, events, and news

▶️ CAT videos

10-15 minute videos providing accessible explainers to climate related issues.

Bloomberg Originals: How Data Centers in Space Could Change AI

“Data centers in space” may sound like science fiction, but as the SpaceX IPO augurs a space boom, tech giants and startups are betting orbital artificial intelligence is the next frontier.

🎤 Podcasts

The latest climate-related podcast episodes. Don't forget, if you're looking around, there's a list of podcasts maintained by CATs - and there’s a full playlist of all the podcast episodes shared in this newsletter this year so far, on ListenNotes - catch up with last year’s here!

Redefining Energy: GB’s NESO - the “cool” operator

Gerard and Laurent have the pleasure of welcoming Fintan Slye, CEO of NESO — Great Britain’s National Energy System Operator.  \nIn a lively and wide-ranging discussion, we explored NESO’s governance and its critical role across the British energy system: from real-time system operation — balancing supply and demand every second — to whole-system planning, market design, and transmission network operation

Outrage + Optimism: London Cooking - A Climate Action Week, a Resigning PM, and the Future of Climate Diplomacy

London Climate Action Week doesn't usually have to compete with extreme weather. But this year, the case for climate action was abundantly clear: a red heat warning, schools shut, trains cancelled, and temperatures breaking the UK's all-time June record. A prime minister's resignation on the opening day only added to the sense that events we’d once considered rare now seem to be happening all the time.

Environment Variables: Modelling a path to Fossil Free Internet with Tom Brown

Chris Adams is joined by special guest Dr. Tom Brown from TU Berlin to explore how modelling can help build a fossil free internet and power grid. They discuss Google's 24/7 carbon free energy goals, the growing impact of data centres on electricity systems, and how investments in clean energy technologies could accelerate global decarbonisation. Along the way, Tom shares why open source energy modelling is helping shape a more transparent and sustainable energy future.

Odd Lots: How Lenovo's CFO Is Allocating Capital During One of History's Biggest Booms

We know that companies around the world are investing heavily in AI. So intense is the race to win the AI battle, that it feels like there's almost no upward limit on how much you could spend on it. So how are CFOs thinking about capex in the AI age? In this episode we speak with Winston Cheng, CFO of Chinese-founded multinational tech firm Lenovo. Lenovo is known for its personal computers, especially its Thinkpad line of laptops, but they are making a push to move beyond its role as one of the leaders in personal computing, integrating AI agents into their devices and investing in building out an “AI Cloud” infrastructure alongside Nvidia. We talk to Cheng about how Lenovo's allocating capital during one of the biggest capex booms in history. We also discuss involution and market competition in China, and how Lenovo's been adapting its supply chain to tariffs.

Printed Circuit: Why Design Reuse Is Energy Conservation

In this episode of the Printed Circuit Podcast, host Steph Chavez welcomes Paul Fleming, Senior Printed Circuit Board Consultant and IPC-certified design instructor — a 45-year industry veteran who built his own PCB service bureau in San Diego before spending two decades as an application engineer across Cadnetics, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, and Siemens, and becoming an educator through the IPC Designer Council.

The Impact Equation: Climate action is about data

How does a trained chemist transition into an investment banker, a senior British diplomat in Beijing, and ultimately, the CEO overseeing the world’s most critical environmental disclosure platform? In this episode Rafi sits down with Sherry Madera, CEO of CDP, to map out her curiosity-led career and explore how data has become the ultimate force for global change. From navigating the thick PM 2.5 smog of Beijing to steering massive data strategies at the London Stock Exchange Group, Sherry has spent her life translating complex risks into actionable boardroom intelligence. Rafi and Sherry dive deep into the mechanics of CDP—an independent platform capturing environmental data from over 24,000 companies representing two-thirds of the world’s market capitalization. Sherry breaks down the core business realities of sustainability, the expansion of disclosure beyond carbon, and why the ultimate test for modern corporations is moving from simple correlation to hard economic causation.

All Things Policy: Are All Minerals Critical In The Same Way?

India lists 51 minerals in its critical mineral list. This is 67% of all commercially mined minerals. And globally too, critical mineral lists are swelling.

But not all critical minerals are critical in the same way. In any case, if 2/3rds of the periodic table is deemed critical, this strips any nuance for informed policy action and mineral prioritisation.

📅 Submitted events

Want an event listed here? Use this event listing form to submit the details so we can add it in the newsletter.

Tuesday Jun 30, 2026 - Conversations on Responsible Technology in Practice

How do organisations balance sustainability with privacy, cybersecurity and AI governance? Join this participatory discussion on implementing responsible technology in practice, featuring Seher Shafiq from Mozilla.

Wednesday Jul 01, 2026 - Small Group Networking for Climate Conscious Tech People - Q3 2026

Connect with eco-conscious tech professionals in intimate breakout groups. Share ideas on building sustainability into your 2026 career and beyond. Free virtual event.

Thursday Jul 02, 2026 - Sustainability Essentials for Professionals

In celebration of London Climate Action Week... Get a sneak peek of how AimHi Earth is scaling climate education through human-driven learning, systems thinking and storytelling - empowering participants with the knowledge, confidence, and tools to drive real-world change 💪

Wednesday Jul 08, 2026 - Green IO Munich

Green IO Munich gathers +250 technologists from 8- 9 July in the smartvillage Bogenhausen. Theme "From measuring to achieving: industrializing IT Sustainability".

CATs can attend for free, contact CAT Organizer Georgina georgina@climateaction.tech or Jordan Voigt on Slack

Thursday Jul 09, 2026 - Agilists4Planet Conference - Bridging Polarities: Harnessing the Power of Tension

In this free online conference, we explore how polarities—such as short vs. long term, pragmatic vs. principled, resilience vs. inaction, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, and emotional vs. rational thinking— are not problems to be solved, but dynamics to be balanced.

📰 News Highlights

LA Times: This hidden gem in ocean science unlocked the secrets of El Niño

CalCOFI is a humbling reminder that it can take decades of commitment to understand even one patch of ocean.

Reuters: China targeting half of power from non-fossil sources by 2030

China is aiming for half of its electricity to come from non-fossil sources by 2030, up from a 42.3% target for 2025, in a new five-year plan ​for the energy sector.

The Free Press Journal: Why AI Conservation Is Repeating Colonial Mistakes

AI-driven forest surveillance systems risk repeating historical patterns of exclusion by marginalising indigenous communities. Examining the rollout of the Digital Forest Management System, the author contends that conservation efforts should incorporate local stewardship and community participation alongside technological innovation.

Forbes: AI, Energy, And The Sustainability Question Taking Shape

The burgeoning AI industry is driving a massive expansion of data centers, consuming significant electricity and projected to use 1.2 trillion liters of water annually by 2030 for cooling. While AI rapidly integrates as foundational infrastructure, its environmental footprint remains largely unaccounted for in corporate sustainability frameworks. Current GHG Protocol Scope 3 rules technically cover AI as a purchased service, but consistent data and explicit categorization are lacking. This creates a "ghost room" in reporting, hindering systematic measurement. As AI moves from a tool to critical infrastructure, experts urge an evolution in sustainability accounting to accurately reflect its impact, ensuring frameworks keep pace with digital innovation and shared responsibility.

USA Today: Texas biotech firm to build 'Noah's Ark' for endangered species

The U.S. Department of the Interior is partnering with a Dallas-based biotech firm to create a genomic and biobanking archive for every species protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Business Wire: New Research Shows Prioritisation of Digital Twins and AI Initiatives to Accelerate Predictive Insights and Infrastructure Resilience

Nearly two thirds of infrastructure organisations cite disconnected systems as barriers to achieving resilience goals, and look to digital twins to unify fragmented data.

Cloud Native Now: Why Open Source Will Define the Next Era of Green Computing

Data centers already account for 1.5% of global electricity demand, and the International Energy Agency projects that number could nearly double by 2030, driven in large part by AI workloads. The FinOps Foundation’s 2025 report found that 36% of global practices and 53% of European practices are now reporting carbon. The cloud’s energy footprint is quickly becoming a first-order engineering and business problem.

In this new reality, cloud sustainability must scale not just with infrastructure, but with the communities and open source ecosystems that developers already rely on.

💚 Papers We Love 💚

Purdue University: When Servers Meet Species - A Fab-to-Grave Lens on Computing’s Biodiversity Impact

Biodiversity loss is a critical planetary boundary, yet its connection to computing remains largely unexamined. Prior sustainability efforts in computing have focused on carbon and water, overlooking biodiversity due to the lack of appropriate metrics and modeling frameworks. This paper presents the first end-to-end analysis of biodiversity impact from computing systems.

💼 Jobs

Remember only jobs listing salary ranges are listed here - to get your job listed, you need to list a salary range. Folks can still look in the #jobs channel. Remember: if you’re looking for advice finding a role, check our #climate-careers channel.

Boundless Impact Research & Analytics - Research Associate - $20/hr - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok

Boundless Impact Research & Analytics provides precise life cycle and techno-economic impact data for advanced technology companies, sustainable brands, and investors. Our analytics validate and differentiate sustainable products, reduce investment risk, and support credible reporting. Boundless blends science-based impact analysis, industry-specific benchmarks, and AI-driven data to deliver the insights companies need to prove their impact and thrive in the market.

Boundless Impact Research & Analytics (Boundless) is seeking a full-time Research Associate with environmental analysis and research experience, and an interest in and aptitude for applying Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) to clean energy and other advanced technologies. The Research Associate will support the Boundless research team across sustainability performance analysis projects (using LCA and TEA).

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