> Source URL: /environment.guide
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title: "Prompt Engineering for Sustainability & Environmental Studies"
description: "How LLMs and foundation models are changing climate analysis and sustainability reporting — and what you could build with them in this course."
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# Prompt Engineering for Sustainability & Environmental Studies

Climate scientists, policy analysts, and sustainability professionals now work with foundation models trained on decades of Earth-observation and regulatory data. The IPCC, EPA, and corporate ESG reports are thousands of pages each — and increasingly the first readers are LLMs.

## Where this is showing up in Sustainability & Environmental Studies

- **[ClimateBERT](https://huggingface.co/climatebert)** (Bingler, Kraus, Leippold, Webersinke — DistilRoBERTa fine-tuned on climate research, news, and corporate reports) ships five task-specific models on Hugging Face, including a TCFD disclosure classifier.
- **[ClimateGPT](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09646)** (7B/13B/70B parameters, Llama 2-based, trained on 4.2B climate-specific tokens with hierarchical RAG) was designed to synthesize interdisciplinary climate research and was trained using renewable energy.
- IBM and NASA's **[Prithvi-WxC](https://huggingface.co/ibm-nasa-geospatial/Prithvi-WxC-1.0-2300M)** (2.3B parameters, 40 years of MERRA-2 data, Sept 2024) and **[Prithvi-EO-2.0](https://research.ibm.com/blog/prithvi2-geospatial)** (600M parameters, trained on NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel dataset) are open foundation models for weather, climate, and geospatial analysis.
- [IPCC Assessment Reports](https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/), EPA regulatory filings, and corporate ESG/[TCFD](https://www.fsb-tcfd.org) disclosures are now the standard corpora for RAG systems serving policy teams, sustainability consultancies, and investor-relations groups.

## Projects you could build in this course

- A RAG assistant over the latest IPCC AR6 report that cites specific paragraphs and figures
- An ESG-metric extractor that pulls Scope 1/2/3 emissions from 10-K sustainability sections
- An agent that translates a local environmental-impact report into a plain-language community brief

[← Back to Thinking With Machines](./index.path.md)


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## Backlinks

The following sources link to this document:

- [Sustainability & Environmental Studies](/index.path.llm.md)