Carbon Intelligence and the Question of Justice

Written by: Malaika

Edited by: Ishaniya

Graphic designer: Iniya

CHRIST University’s Central and Bannerghatta campuses hosted the inaugural International Conference on Climate Justice (ICCJ) 2026, a two-day gathering of legal scholars, policy researchers, engineers and students on 23 and 24 July, under a theme that sounded, at first glance, like an engineering brief: Carbon Intelligence and the Road to a Carbon-Neutral Future. But by the end of the second day, the conference had morphed into something more like an extended argument over who gets to design the tools that will shape the planet’s carbon future, and who is left out of that process. CHRIST’s Centre for Korean Studies and Centre for Digital Innovation, in association with the Department of Liberal Arts, the School of Law, the School of Engineering & Technology, the School of Sciences and the Department of International Studies, Political Science and History jointly organised ICCJ 2026. Its list of international partners was particularly long, including the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the Indo-Korea Science and Technology Centre, the American University in Cairo, Halla University in Wonju, and the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Dr. Prerana Srimal chaired the opening plenary session, “The Carbon Intelligence Continuum: AI, Climate Justice, and Global Policy Futures,” which set the tone for the two days that followed. What became clear in the session was that the organisers wanted to hold two ideas in tension in the conference: that the achievement of carbon neutrality is essentially a technical challenge requiring artificial intelligence, robust data infrastructure and predictive modelling; and that none of these tools have meaning unless they are governed justly. This tension was evident again and again throughout the programme, most sharply articulated in the panel discussion III: Law and Climate Justice.

Panel III, moderated by Jan Jerzy Kotlarz, included speakers whose work ranges from practicing law to grounded climate advocacy. The panel included Advocate Dr. Raghava Parthasarathy, who runs his own legal chambers; Dr Ali Faran Gulrez, Assistant Professor of Law at Manipal Law School; Bhargavi Rao, an independent researcher who works on coastal and environmental governance; and Sakshi M. Krishna, a legal advocate and climate governance researcher who is associated with various international platforms on sustainability. The panel did not see climate justice as a slogan but as a question of structural inequality, and it was approached through the combined lenses of economics and law, not just climate science. The discussion was about whether the current legal and economic structures can hold polluters really accountable or whether they tend to formalise existing power imbalances. This framing pushed the debate into areas that many of the more technical sessions at the conference did not directly address—questions of enforceability, legal standing, and whether carbon markets are a mechanism for justice or a new kind of trading floor for old inequalities. The panel did not reach any one resolution, nor was it expected that it should; the tenor of the discussion made it clear that none was expected, the value of the session being in bringing the difficulty of the questions to the surface rather than in resolving them.

If Panel III interrogated accountability at the level of law and policy, Technical Session III offered a view of accountability being built, quite literally, from the ground up. Among its presentations was an AI-Powered Carbon Intelligence System for Vehicle Emission Monitoring and Eco-Driving Analysis, developed by students Vibha Varun, Tarun M, Sidharth P S, and Madhupurna Nanda Kishore. The project centred on a dashboard designed to track harmful emissions from fuel combustion in real time and encourage driving behaviour that reduces a vehicle's carbon footprint. Positioned between sessions on smart absorption systems and hydrogen storage frameworks, the presentation was easy to overlook on a dense conference schedule. Yet it gave concrete form to the abstractions raised elsewhere at the conference: carbon intelligence, in this instance, was not a policy phrase but a working dashboard measuring the gases leaving a tailpipe and reporting that figure back to a driver. While Panel III raised questions about accountability at the level of courts and carbon markets, this student project attempted to answer a narrower version of the same question — accountability at the level of a single engine.

As a first edition, ICCJ 2026 was ambitious and, at points, still finding its footing - a characteristic underscored by the title of its closing round-table discussion, "The Gap Between Knowing and Doing: Designing Carbon Intelligence for Human Action." The phrase doubled as an apt description of the conference's own central preoccupation. Across its two days, ICCJ 2026 made a serious attempt to prevent "climate justice" from becoming a term confined to a conference banner, instead pressing its speakers and delegates to confront the distance between technical capability and just outcomes.

In the end, climate justice and carbon intelligence cannot be pursued in isolation; they must advance together, each reinforcing the other's goals and methods. Only through their intertwined progress can we hope to build a resilient and equitable future. The conference affirmed that this integration is not optional but essential.