Accurately answering climate science questions requires scientific literature and climate data. Interpreting climate literature and data, however, presents inherent challenges such as determining relevant climate factors and drivers, interpreting uncertainties in the science and data, and dealing with the sheer volume of data. My Climate CoPilot is a platform that assists a range of potential users, such as farmer advisors, to mitigate and adapt to projected climate changes by providing answers to questions that are grounded in evidence. It emphasises transparency, user privacy, low-resource use, and provides automatic evaluation. It also strives for scientific robustness and accountability. Fifty domain experts carefully evaluated every aspect of My Climate CoPilot and based on their interactions and feedback, the system continues to evolve.

The generative capabilities of the large language models (LLMs) are deployed for domain-specific question answering systems. However, their ability to answer climate adaptation questions remains unclear. In particular, can they be used by agronomists and climate scientists to answer questions on the best climate adaptation strategies? Answering questions in this domain requires knowledge of climate data and its uncertainties, and the ability to link them to the broader climate literature while accommodating the unique constraints of users and experts. We investigate the generative and evaluative capabilities of several state-of-the-art LLMs, open-source and proprietary, on climate adaptation for agriculture questions posed by domain experts using evaluation criteria designed by the experts.We propose an iterative exploration framework that enables LLMs to dynamically aggregate information from heterogeneous sources, such as text from climate literature and structured tabular climate data from climate model projections and historical observations. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs can aggregate heterogeneous data to (1) answer questions, but at a trade-off between presentation quality and epistemological accuracy; and, (2) evaluate answers, but are not as competent at identifying high-quality answers and erroneous information compared to domain experts.

Climate adaptation in the agricultural sector necessitates tools that equip farmers and farm advisors with relevant and trustworthy information to help increase their resiliency to climate change. We introduce My Climate Advisor, a question-answering (QA) prototype that synthesises information from different data sources, such as peer-reviewed scientific literature and high-quality, industry-relevant grey literature to generate answers, with references, to a given user’s question. Our prototype uses open-source generative models for data privacy and intellectual property protection, and retrieval augmented generation for answer generation, grounding and provenance. While there are standard evaluation metrics for QA systems, no existing evaluation framework suits our LLM-based QA application in the climate adaptation domain. We design an evaluation framework with seven metrics based on the requirements of the domain experts to judge the generated answers from 12 different LLM-based models. Our initial evaluations through a user study via domain experts show promising usability results.