GCA Framework: A GCC Countries–Grounded Dataset and Agentic Pipeline for Climate Decision Support
Muhammad Umer Sheikh, Khawar Shehzad, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Muhammad Haris Khan
Abstract
Climate decision-making in the GCC states increasingly demands systems that can translate heterogeneous scientific and policy evidence into actionable guidance, yet general-purpose large language models (LLMs) remain weak both in region-specific climate knowledge and grounded interaction with geospatial and forecasting tools. We present the GCA framework, which unifies (i) GCA-DS, a curated multimodal dataset grounded in the GCC states, and (ii) Gulf Climate Agent (GCA), a tool-augmented agent for climate analysis. GCA-DS comprises nearly 200k question-answer pairs spanning governmental policies and adaptation plans, NGO and international frameworks, academic literature, and event-driven reporting on heatwaves, dust storms, and floods, complemented with remote-sensing inputs that couple imagery with textual evidence. Building on this foundation, the GCA agent orchestrates a modular tool pipeline grounded in real-time and historical signals and geospatial processing that produces derived indices and interpretable visualizations. Finally, we benchmark open and proprietary LLMs on climate tasks in the GCC states and show that domain fine-tuning and tool integration substantially improve reliability over general-purpose baselines.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.1967
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 42494–42506
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1967/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Muhammad Umer Sheikh, Khawar Shehzad, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, and Muhammad Haris Khan. 2026. GCA Framework: A GCC Countries–Grounded Dataset and Agentic Pipeline for Climate Decision Support. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 42494–42506, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- GCA Framework: A GCC Countries–Grounded Dataset and Agentic Pipeline for Climate Decision Support (Sheikh et al., ACL 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1967.pdf