Climate change demands fundamentally new approaches to decision-making. Where to invest scarce adaptation resources across competing priorities, how to design carbon markets that balance efficiency with equity, and how to coordinate across jurisdictions with vastly different historical responsibilities - these are, at their core, problems of reasoning under uncertainty, constrained optimization, and multi-agent coordination.

The 2026 Planning for a Better Planet AAAI Fall Symposium brings together formal planning and reasoning researchers with climate domain experts to tackle the challenge of making the planet a healthier, more sustainable place. This symposium aims to gather both the AI and climate communities to discuss opportunities for climate-motivated planning research. This includes not only AI researchers sharing new algorithms and applications but also climate experts sharing successes and challenges from their own domains, with the goal of highlighting “problems in search of solutions” to drive future climate-oriented planning research.

AI Domains	Climate Domains
Automated planning and scheduling Multiagent coordination Mechanism design and negotiation protocols Probabilistic planning under uncertainty Robotics task, motion, and path planning Operations research Optimization	Earth, ocean, and climate sciences Energy systems and decarbonization Land use, agriculture, and food systems Transportation, urban planning, and infrastructure Recycling, remediation, decarbonization Adaptation and resilience Climate policy, governance, and environmental justice Climate advocacy, policy engagement, and social impact
Foundational problem areas
Gather data to reduce uncertainty in earth and climate systems modeling Optimize systems, infrastructure, and resource distribution to mitigate climate impacts Coordinate systems and communities for climate adaptation and resilience Plan for the socio-political, economic, and technical challenges of the transition to net zero Translate research into advocacy, engagement, and measurable social impact

Objectives

Recognizing that research to address these foundational challenges is a long-term effort, “success” in this symposium will involve achieving the following objectives, which focus on defining an agenda for climate-inspired planning research and kick-starting a community of researchers working in this area.

1. Identify opportunities for impact (“problems in search of a solution”) where automated planning, reasoning, and decision-making can support climate science, climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and climate justice. For example, planning sensor deployment to learn more effective models, planning more sustainable, equitable, or resilient infrastructure, planning for disaster recovery, and using planning to translate data and models into climate action.
2. Define research themes and directions within automated planning, reasoning, and decision-making that enable these opportunities — including not only climate-related applications of existing methods but also new areas of research inspired by these applications.
3. Cultivate a community for researchers working at the intersection of AI/robotics and climate that will launch new collaborations and research directions and facilitate climate advocacy within planning research.
4. Surface the tensions that arise at the boundary of what formal reasoning can and cannot resolve. For instance, climate mitigation offers diffuse, global benefits while imposing concentrated costs on identifiable groups. Layered on this are problems of intergenerational fairness and international equity. Fundamentally, these are normative questions. The symposium is designed to surface these tensions and probe the limits of autonomous planning by inviting climate policy researchers and social scientists into the conversation as essential partners rather than observers.
5. Foster cross-disciplinary literacy, collaboration, and opportunities:
   • For climate domain experts, this symposium will offer direct exposure to formal planning and reasoning tools that address problems at the core of climate decision-making: decision-making under uncertainty, multi-stakeholder coordination, constrained resource allocation, and risk-aware policy design.
   • For planning and reasoning experts, this symposium will offer direct exposure to the challenges and opportunities of developing and deploying AI and robotics applications in service of climate challenges, including navigating unstructured environments for robotics, multi-faceted planning, optimization, and decision support domains for climate justice, etc.

Call for Participation

We invite submissions and participants from across the planning and climate domains who are interested in or have engaged in

1. climate-inspired planning research,
2. climate applications of planning methods, and
3. identifying planning/decision-making challenges within climate domains (aka “problems in search of solutions”).

We invite both short and long papers at various levels of maturity, including extended abstracts that highlight more speculative or prospective work, short papers that highlight case studies or works in progress, and full papers that present more mature solutions. We also welcome submissions that identify aspirational future directions or opportunities for climate-motivated AI planning.

We specifically invite submissions from participants in climate domains, highlighting challenges that represent novel opportunities for collaboration with the planning research community. In particular, we welcome extended abstracts and short papers that highlight interesting planning or decision-making challenges or case studies from climate domains, and do not require these challenges or case studies to be formalized as decision or planning problems. We invite participation from across climate domains, including from climate scientists, environmental economists, policy researchers, and practitioners working on a variety of topics, including carbon pricing and market mechanisms, international climate policy coordination, national climate strategy development, adaptation investment planning, energy transition pathways, climate risk assessment, and environmental justice. We welcome submissions highlighting challenges faced by, and work done with, communities across geopolitical and social contexts, especially those most impacted by climate change, including indigenous communities and those in the global south.

Important Dates

• September 1: Submission deadline
• September 15: Notification of acceptance
• September 29: Camera-ready deadline
• November 5-7 – Fall Symposium Series, Westin Arlington, Arlington, Virginia, USA 

Submission Guidelines

• AAAI two-column, camera-ready format (per the AAAI-26 author kit)
• Single-blind
• Submission length:
  • Extended abstracts: 2 pages + 1 page for references/appendices.
  • Short paper: 4 pages + 1 page for references/appendices.
  • Full paper: 8 pages + 1 page for references/appendices
• EasyChair submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fss26

Registration and Attendance

Please see the AAAI 2026 Fall Symposium website for registration and attendance information.

Stay Connected

Please join our mailing list to stay informed about opportunities related to this event:

• Join via web (Gmail address required): Visit https://groups.google.com/g/plan4planet-l/ and click “Ask to join group”
• Join via email: Send a blank email to plan4planet-l+subscribe@googlegroups.com

Organizing Committee

• Jim Boerkoel, Harvey Mudd College
• Charles Dawson, Emerald AI
• Jeremy Frank, NASA Ames Research Center
• Alice Lépissier, Green Finance AI
• J. Pablo Ortiz-Partida, Union of Concerned Scientists
• Amy Quarkume, Howard University
• Jonathan Stock, NASA Ames Research Center

Contact Us

• plan4planet-26@easychair.org

Tentative Schedule

Coming Soon!