Call for Proposals: Apply to join Klarna’s AI for Climate Resilience Program (Grants of up to $300,000 awarded)

Ednah Carrick August 11, 2025

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Closing Date: 31 August 2025

Call for Proposals: Apply to join Klarna’s AI for Climate Resilience Program (Grants of up to $300,000 awarded)

Unlocking the power of AI for climate adaptation

The AI for Climate Resilience Program is a new initiative by Klarna that aims to support pioneering projects that leverage artificial intelligence for climate adaptation in underserved, climate-vulnerable regions.

The program will back projects that help local communities adapt to a changing climate and build long-term resilience. This includes for example strengthening food security, enhancing health systems, and building coastal resilience in regions that are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts. Grants of up to $300,000 will be awarded to selected projects, alongside an opportunity to get access to a support network of mentors, training and community of practice.

Who should apply?

Klarna’s AI for Climate Resilience Program aims to catalyze practical, locally-led AI initiatives that strengthen climate adaptation capacities in underserved, climate-vulnerable regions. Klarna is inviting proposals from organizations working to reduce vulnerability of local communities to climate-related risks in low- and middle-income countries. Whether you’re using AI to support smallholder farmers, build early warning systems, or translate complex risk data into community action plans—Klarna want to hear from you.

Projects must demonstrate a clear use case for AI, a pathway to local ownership, and a commitment to responsible, collaborative innovation. Early-stage ideas are welcome too, especially from teams needing support to refine technical details or implementation plans.

Klarna aim to support projects that deliver on one or several of the following types of outcomes:

Harness and elevate local knowledge. Discern, organize, and analyze community insights to generate concise, actionable information accessible both to large-scale actors (e.g. governments, NGOs) and the very communities that contributed it.
Develop and demonstrate novel AI applications in real-world settings—such as smartphone-based AI advisers for smallholder farmers to enhance resilience, or AI-powered climate-risk assessments for low-lying islands to inform infrastructure planning and relocation strategies.
Improve and enhance adoption, cost-effectiveness or sustainability of existing AI solutions for climate adaptation and resilience, including advancing ecosystem-wide knowledge by contributing open datasets, benchmarks, or best-practice insights that benefit the broader AI-for-adaptation community.

What Klarna don’t fund:

Short-term relief or emergency aid.
Pure research or proof-of-concept projects without a concrete plan for field deployment or community adoption.
Projects focused solely on GHG emission reductions.
Service providers (e.g. platform hosts, MRV-tools) whose offerings do not directly improve community adaptation outcomes.
Projects lacking robust AI risk governance, i.e. without clear plans to anticipate and manage AI bias, errors, model drift, opacity, and trust issues.

Eligibility

The basic requirements that a project or proposal must meet to be considered for funding, support, or participation:

Strategic alignment: The proposal addresses a concrete climate-impact challenge in line with the outlined focus for the call.
Implementation-focused: The team will adapt, localize, scale or otherwise deploy a concrete solution; no “research-only”.
Use of AI: The proposed use of AI has clear potential, is collaborative, and responsible.There should be a clear, compelling rationale for its use, demonstrating how AI directly contributes to addressing the project’s objectives. Klarna also welcome early stage applications from teams that need support in developing technical details further.
Geographic focus: The project is supporting underserved, climate-vulnerable communities in low and middle income countries.
Public-benefit purpose: The project must be committed to a public-benefit purpose, ensuring its outcomes primarily serve the public interest with tangible social and environmental benefits. For-profit entities must demonstrate how their project aligns with public-benefit goals and how they will ensure equitable outcomes that directly support local communities.