For years, Klarna has positioned itself as a digital banking and payments innovator. Now it wants to be something else too: a catalyst for AI-driven climate resilience.
Today the company launched the AI for Climate Resilience Program, a global initiative backing technologists developing artificial intelligence solutions to help communities adapt to climate risks—especially in regions already experiencing the sharpest impacts of a warming planet.
It’s a rare move for a fintech giant, and a signal of the widening overlap between financial infrastructure, data technology, and climate adaptation.
“AI has transformed how people make financial decisions, and we believe it can do the same for climate adaptation,” said David Sandström, Klarna’s CMO. The company’s pitch is simple: help innovators interpret complex environmental data and turn it into tools that directly support communities facing challenges such as water scarcity, crop instability, public-health threats, and increasingly frequent natural disasters.
A New Wave of AI-Driven Climate Tools
Klarna’s program doesn’t just hand out funding. Each selected organization receives 18 months of tailored technical guidance, strategic mentorship, and access to Klarna’s AI and responsible-tech experience—skills the company has honed over two years of integrating AI across its entire financial ecosystem.
This is part of a broader pattern: major tech and fintech players are increasingly applying their AI chops to climate issues. But Klarna’s model is notable for its focus on localized, community-driven solutions, not big-data dashboards built solely for governments or multinationals.
The company frames climate resilience as a frontier where practical, lightweight AI tools could have outsized impact.
Meet the Six Innovators Tackling Climate Risk With AI
An independent advisory panel chose six high-impact projects that blend responsible AI practices with strong community grounding. Many are operating in areas where climate pressure is rising faster than institutional capacity.
SEEDS (India)
Uses AI and satellite data to verify disaster losses quickly, enabling families to access relief funds without delays or inequities.
Acres of Ice (Global)
Turns excess winter water into man-made glaciers using AI-guided processes—an unconventional but proven method of providing irrigation for mountain communities as natural glaciers recede.
Geotek Water Solutions (Nigeria)
Deploys AI to locate and monitor underground water sources in drought-stricken areas, supporting long-term access to clean water.
Self-Employed Women’s Association & IFPRI (India)
Provides AI-generated hyperlocal weather insights directly to women workers’ phones, helping them plan daily activities and protect their livelihoods.
Sakawarga Foundation (Indonesia)
Offers an AI “resilience coach” that uses local-language chat to train villages in disaster preparedness, accessible from any basic mobile device.
GainForest e.V. (Latin America)
Supports Indigenous forest guardians with AI-powered biodiversity mapping tools, strengthening grassroots conservation.
These organizations span not only continents but also radically different approaches to climate adaptation—from early-warning systems to hyperlocal advisory tools and new ecological engineering methods. Their common thread: AI built for real-world constraints and community ownership.
Why Klarna’s Climate Pivot Matters
The initiative attracted over 1,200 global proposals, a figure that underscores just how fast climate-tech innovation is expanding—especially in emerging regions like East Africa, West Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.
Many proposals leveraged cheaper satellite imagery, better sensor networks, and generative AI language tools. Notably, several projects used multilingual conversational AI to bridge literacy gaps and deliver climate guidance to remote communities—an approach that stands to scale faster than traditional training programs.
Rachel Adams, PhD, CEO of South Africa’s Global Centre on AI Governance, called Klarna’s program “a powerful example of how AI can serve communities on the climate frontlines.” The subtext: local innovators frequently have the best understanding of community needs but lack the resources to make their solutions production-ready.
Klarna is effectively stepping into that gap.
The Broader Context: AI’s Expanding Role in Climate Adaptation
The climate-tech space has long invested in mitigation—reducing emissions, scaling renewables, improving carbon markets. But adaptation has historically lagged due to limited funding and attention.
That’s changing as climate volatility becomes impossible to ignore. Floods, droughts, heatwaves, crop loss, water shocks, and ecological disruption hit hardest in places with the least infrastructure to withstand them. AI’s ability to analyze messy environmental data in real time makes it increasingly attractive for:
- Predictive climate-risk modeling
- Agriculture guidance and crop-optimization
- Water-resource discovery and monitoring
- Disaster early-warning and response
- Biodiversity and forest monitoring
- Health-risk forecasting
The next wave of climate-tech investment is shifting toward practical, small-footprint applications—precisely the focus of Klarna’s program.
A Fintech Company’s Climate Ambition
Klarna isn’t starting from zero. Through its Climate and Nature Transformation Funds, the company has already directed more than $24 million toward climate and nature initiatives and has previously supported 15 organizations developing AI tools for climate innovation in partnership with The Climate Collective.
The AI for Climate Resilience Program expands that mission, moving from funding to hands-on acceleration.
For Klarna, the initiative also serves a strategic purpose: showing that fintech—an industry fluent in data processing, risk analysis, and real-time decision systems—has a meaningful role to play in climate adaptation. Many industry peers are inching in this direction, but Klarna’s model is structured, global, and unusually grassroots-focused.
What’s Next for AI-Powered Climate Resilience
As more climate-sensitive regions gain access to AI tools that are multilingual, low-bandwidth, and built for local realities, the competitive advantage shifts toward organizations that can scale responsibly and partner deeply with communities.
Klarna’s bet is that the next breakthroughs in climate adaptation won’t come from large enterprise platforms, but from distributed innovators solving tangible problems: water access, crop stability, disaster readiness, and safety.
If successful, the program could become a blueprint for how tech giants support community-led resilience in an era where climate disruption is the new norm.
