AI-driven climate finance research: Current status and future prospects

With the increasing global climate changes and the acceleration of climate governance in recent years, climate finance—as an important bridge between climate sustainability and financial resource allocation—has emerged as a core issue of concern for scholars and policymakers worldwide. However, traditional statistical and econometric methods face substantial challenges in addressing the nonlinearity, high dimensionality, and dynamics of the climate-economy-finance system. Artificial intelligence technology, with its advantages of multimodal data fusion, nonlinear modeling, and multi-objective dynamic optimization, has empowered climate finance with a new research paradigm. This paper systematically discusses the frontiers, limitations, and potential future research topics of artificial intelligence-enabled climate finance research. First, this paper reviews the applications of artificial intelligence technology in climate finance research and identifies three frontier directions for artificial intelligence-enabled climate finance research. Second, it analyzes the limitations and challenges associated with the application of artificial intelligence in current climate finance research. Finally, this paper proposes possible application scenarios and important directions of artificial intelligence-driven climate finance research in the future, which will promote theoretical development and practical application in this field.