Juliet Rothenberg: The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2026 - Time Magazine
One of the most exciting aspects of the AI boom is its potential to help the world mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. Juliet Rothenberg leads the team at Google that’s producing tools to do just that, like FireSat, a constellation of satellites designed to detect a 5x5 meter (16x16 ft.) wildfire anywhere on Earth within 20 minutes, and Flood Hub, which uses AI-driven forecasting to predict floods days earlier than other models to help communities stay safe. Earlier this year, Flood Hub expanded its AI flash flood predictions to cover urban areas. —Jessica Hullinger
What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government (other than your own), needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?We need to keep progressing on mitigating climate change, but it’s very clear that we’re headed past the 1.5° Celsius threshold that scientists believe is critical to reducing the most damaging effects of climate change. And especially with the Super El Niño this year, we also need to recognize that climate change is here today. Aligned with the U.N.’s Early Warnings for All initiative, we need to start moving towards a world where no one is surprised by a natural disaster. This means putting in place comprehensive forecasting, monitoring, alerting, and response systems globally, so that we can protect lives and livelihoods from the climate crisis.
What’s one sustainability effort you personally will try to adopt in the next year, and why?For many of us, air travel is the single largest contributor to our personal carbon footprint; a single long-haul flight can easily eclipse our household, diet, and driving choices combined. We often look at aviation solely through the lens of fuel burn, but short-lived climate forces like contrails actually account for more than a third of aviation's total warming footprint. While my team works on improving the global AI models that have already helped airlines and air traffic control reduce contrails by over half, I want to personally align my consumer habits—making sure my own travel choices support the carriers paving the way for sustainable skies.
That’s why my personal commitment this year is to make my essential travel as contrail-conscious as possible. This means prioritizing airlines that actively participate in contrail avoidance programs, favoring morning or daytime flights when contrails are less warming, or better yet checking out the Google Flights tooltip on the likelihood of contrail warming for a given flight, and also opting for rail over short-haul flights wherever feasible.
What is a climate solution (other than your own) that isn't getting the attention or funding it deserves?I’ll share a solution from one of our partners: FireSat, by the Earth Fire Alliance. When fully operational, the FireSat constellation will be able to detect a garage-sized wildfire within 20 minutes, anywhere on Earth. Fire authorities say that this will be a gamechanger for their ability to respond to devastating wildfires, like those in France and Spain this summer, because the greatest gift that we can give firefighters is time.
FireSat has the first 4 satellites in orbit, and a 20-minute revisit will be achieved once the constellation reaches 52 satellites. Google.org, Bezos Earth Fund, and the Moore Foundation have all supported FireSat, and more funding is needed to realize the potential of this vision.
What gives you hope about the future of the planet/climate movement?I’m tremendously optimistic about the ability of AI to accelerate the rate of scientific progress towards climate-friendly technologies. This is a dramatic change since I started working in the field 22 years ago. As a case in point, our climate teams are now able to build software prototypes for things like satellite detection in less than an hour, which previously would have taken months, and now they can even develop novel hardware solutions in months that would previously have taken years.
Climate change won’t be solved by a single silver bullet. It will take hundreds of practical, durable innovations working in parallel to deliver impact at scale, which is why it’s so exciting that the pace of innovation is accelerating dramatically.
Do you think AI will help or worsen the climate crisis? How?My job day in and day out is to apply AI to help solve the climate crisis, and I’m a big believer in that potential because we're already seeing it in action. For example, our Contrails project targets an impact equivalent to roughly 4% of the impact that today’s warming will have over the next 20 years (known as global warming potential, or GWP20), or 1-2% of the impact over the next 100 years (GWP100). In live commercial flights across U.S. and international airspace, we’ve proven that AI predictions can help pilots cut contrail formation by more than half, avoiding these warming zones in a way that’s just as simple as avoiding turbulence.
We’re also working with dozens of governments that are using our cutting-edge crisis models for hazards like floods, fires, and cyclones in service of our team’s north star: that no one should ever be surprised by a natural disaster coming their way.
And it’s important to acknowledge that AI will have additional energy demands. My team is hard at work on applying agentic AI for science to accelerate the development of clean, low-cost energy solutions—expect to hear more from us there over time.
The original version of this story misstated which projects Rothenberg's team produces. They have worked on FireSat and Flood Hub, but not WeatherNext.
