Climate Governance and AI Regulation: Bringing Together Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Climate change and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are typically treated as separate regulatory domains. This article argues that they pose similar challenges to law: both are global and collectively caused, both generate diffuse and potentially long-term harms alongside highly concentrated private gains, and both strain an individual?rights-centred legal architecture designed for bilateral disputes between identifiable actors. First, I situate climate governance and AI regulation within a shared “tragedy of the commons” logic and show how existing fundamental?rights frameworks produce a structural protection gap for systemic risks. Second, I analyse key instruments of EU environmental law, demonstrating that AI’s ecological footprint—energy and water use, resource extraction, rebound effects—is regulated only indirectly and that responsibility is diffused along global supply chains. I then argue that what I call “regulatory solutionism” is a particular risk in digital and climate regulation: dense process obligations obscure the absence of hard distributive choices, prohibitions, and enforceable limits. Finally, I propose using the precautionary principle as a common normative foundation for climate governance and AI regulation, including through consumption caps for particularly resource-intensive AI systems and mandatory environmental risk assessments.