Publications

Galaz, V. 2025. Dark Machines: How Artificial Intelligence, Digitalization and Automation is Changing our Living Planet. Routledge.

This book offers a critical primer on how Artificial Intelligence and digitalization are shaping our planet and the risks posed to society and environmental sustainability. As the pressure of human activities accelerates on Earth, so too does the hope that digital and artificially intelligent technologies will be able to help us deal with dangerous climate and environmental change. Technology giants, international think-tanks...

Sánchez-García, P.A., Galaz, V., Rocha, J.C. & Barbour, F. 2025. Climate change, nature degradation, and financial stability: a review of domino-effects between finance, climate, and the biosphere. Ecology & Society, vol. 30 (2). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-16130-300236

The threat associated with climate change and nature degradation poses complex financial challenges. Our systematic literature review of 88 finance-related publications published between 2015 and early 2022 revealed a gap in research on nature-related financial risks and their connections to climate change, particularly regarding ocean-related risks beyond rising sea levels. Although methods are available to assess these risks...

Victor Galaz, Hannah Metzler, Caroline Schill, Therese Lindahl, Stefan Daume, Arvid Marklund, Antonio J. Castro, Jennifer Bard, Timon McPhearson, Diego Galafassi, Helge Peters. 2025. Artificial intelligence, digital social networks, and climate emotions. npj Climate Action. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00225-6

Emotions relate to climate change action in various ways. Here we elaborate on how the expansion of digital social networks and advances in artificial intelligence, ranging from recommender systems to generative AI, may affect the way people perceive and engage emotionally on climate change. We develop a simple framework that links individual and collective emotions, AI, and climate action, and suggest three critical areas in ...

Owen Gaffney, Amy Luers, Franklin Carrero-Martinez, Berna Oztekin-Gunaydin, Felix Creutzig, Virginia Dignum, Victor Galaz, Naoko Ishii, Francesca Larosa, Maria Leptin, Ken Takahashi Guevara. 2025. The Earth alignment principle for artificial intelligence. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01536-6

Sandra Hacón, Gloria Amparo Rivera, Ylana Elias Rodrigues, Federico Ernesto Viscarra Riveros, Cecilia Siliansky de Andreazzi, Gisele Winck, Victor Galaz, Nathália Nascimento, Putira Sacueana, Carlos Mena. 2024. Health in the Amazon: Environmental, Social and Economic Challenges. Science Panel for the Amazon. https://doi.org/10.55161/MEIO3673

Stefan Daume, Victor Galaz, Petter Bjersér. 2023. Automated Framing of Climate Change? The Role of Social Bots in the Twitter Climate Change Discourse During the 2019/2020 Australia Bushfires. Social Media + Society. Sage Journals. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231168370

Extreme weather-related events like wildfires have been increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. Public online conversations that reflect on these events as climate emergencies can create awareness and build support for climate action but are also used to spread misinformation and climate change denial. To what extent automated social media accounts—“social bots”—amplify different perspectives of such events...

Victor Galaz, Juan Rocha, Paula Andrea Sánchez-García, Alice Dauriach, Tarik Roukny, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen. 2023. Financial influence on global risks of zoonotic emerging and re-emerging diseases: an integrative analysis. The Lancet Planetary Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2542-5196(23)00232-2

Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), such as Ebola virus disease and highly pathogenic influenza, are serious threats to human health and wellbeing worldwide. The financial sector has an important, yet often ignored, influence as owners and investors in industries that are associated with anthropogenic land-use changes in ecosystems linked to increased EIDs risks. We aimed to analyse financial influence associa...

Stefan Daume, Petter Bjersér, Victor Galaz. 2023. Mapping the automation of Twitter communications on climate change, sustainability, and environmental crises — a review of current research. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101384

We present a review of current research on social bots and their potential impact on Twitter discourses around climate, environmental, and sustainability topics; we collect the methods used to detect social bots, approaches to determine their online impact, extract a high-level normative assessment of automation, and summarize the recommendations for stakeholders to manage the challenges created by automation. We note a lack o...

Victor Galaz. 2022. Global environmental governance in times of turbulence. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.05.018

Economy and Finance for a Just Future on a Thriving Planet