AI-Driven Climate Policy Scenario Generation for Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Climate policy scenario generation and evaluation have traditionally relied on integrated assessment models (IAMs) and expert-driven qualitative analysis. These methods enable stakeholders, such as policymakers and researchers, to anticipate impacts, plan governance strategies, and develop mitigation measures. However, traditional methods are often time-intensive, reliant on simple extrapolations of past trends, and limited in capturing the complex and interconnected nature of energy and climate issues. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI models trained on vast datasets, these limitations can be addressed, ensuring robustness even under limited data conditions. In this work, we explore the novel method that employs generative AI, specifically large language models (LLMs), to simulate climate policy scenarios for Sub-Saharan Africa. These scenarios focus on energy transition themes derived from the historical United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP) documents. By leveraging generative models, the project aims to create plausible and diverse policy scenarios that align with regional climate goals and energy challenges. Given limited access to human evaluators, automated techniques were employed for scenario evaluation. We generated policy scenarios using the llama3.2-3B model. Of the 34 generated responses, 30 (88%) passed expert validation, accurately reflecting the intended impacts provided in the corresponding prompts. We compared these validated responses against assessments from a human climate expert and two additional LLMs (gemma2-2B and mistral-7B). Our structured, embedding-based evaluation framework shows that generative AI effectively generate scenarios that are coherent, relevant, plausible, and diverse. This approach offers a transformative tool for climate policy planning in data-constrained regions.