AI and the Future of Environmental Governance in China and the West
Annah Lake Zhu, Chunyan Wang, Yang Liu, Jie Long, Zishu Wang, Paulan Korenhof · Environmental Science & Technology · 2026
T he rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping environmental governance, 1 yet China and the West are responding to its opportunities and challenges in divergent ways.This reflects a fundamental divide in priorities.Western initiatives highlight ethical concerns and risks of deploying AI at scale, 2 alongside its immense environmental costs; China, in contrast, treats AI as an integral tool for environmental governance, prioritizing scale and speed over deliberation.Underpinning these strategies is a deeper divergence in sociotechnical imaginaries�the West's largely "human-centered" and participatory vision versus China's pervasive and more centralized aspirations.These contrasting paradigms, underexplored to date, are key to understanding AI's transformative impact in the field of environmental governance.They contribute to what commentators are calling a "great AI divide", 3 with China's trust in and embrace of AI far surpassing that of the West.4 The consequences for the future scale, centralization, and automation of digital environmental governance are profound.5 ■ ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES IN CHINA AND THE WESTThere is no doubt that the West has different priorities and concerns than China when it comes to AI and the environment.An overview of environmental policies in the United States, the EU, and China in the past five years reveals these different dispositions (Figure 1).In both the United States and EU, AI-related keywords show a strong focus on funding, governance, and security dimensions, with frequent keywords such as "risk" and "standard".In China, however, policies place far greater emphasis on enhancing and