Draft — not yet public. This page has been prepared so that Kim Hill and prospective panellists can see what the 2027 event involves. Two of the four panel places are still being filled, and the date and venue remain provisional until the Lincoln University lecture timetable is set in October 2026. The page is not linked from anywhere on this site and is hidden from search engines.
1The 2027 topic
Artificial intelligence is reshaping every sector of the global economy and will consequently have profound environmental effects. Kim Hill and four panellists will discuss the nature of these effects, and how the choices we make now will determine whether they accelerate environmental decline or drive the transition to a sustainable future.
The costs are accruing now
The energy footprint of AI infrastructure is immediate and measurable. Data centres already consume around 1–2% of global electricity, and demand is accelerating as model complexity grows. Cooling these facilities draws down stressed aquifers in water-scarce regions. The rare earth elements and critical minerals embedded in AI hardware require energy-intensive and often environmentally destructive mining, and planned obsolescence of AI-optimised chips generates growing volumes of e-waste. These costs are not hypothetical; they are accruing now.
The same computation is transforming environmental management
However, the same computational power is transforming our capacity to manage the natural world. AI optimises electricity grids to integrate intermittent renewables more effectively, reducing transmission losses and displacing fossil generation. Precision agriculture platforms cut fertiliser and water inputs while maintaining yields. Machine learning models identify deforestation from satellite imagery faster than any human monitoring programme, and in materials science, AI compresses decades of experimental work into months, accelerating the development of next-generation batteries and carbon capture technologies.
Questions for the panel
Themes in the discussion include: who controls the energy mix powering AI infrastructure? Who bears the environmental costs of hardware manufacture and disposal? And, critically, who captures the efficiency gains?
New Zealand is not insulated from these questions. Data centre investment is growing, electricity demand projections are shifting, and the agricultural sector is being asked to adopt AI-driven tools whose full environmental accounting remains incomplete.
2Date, venue & format
- Date
- Thursday 18 March 2027 Provisional
- Venue
- S1, Stewart Building, Lincoln University Provisional
- Doors open
- 6:30 pm, for refreshments and networking
- Proceedings
- 7:30 pm
- Entry
- A $5 koha is requested at the door; booking is not required
- Audience
- Around 300 people, drawn from the university, the science sector and the wider community
- Organiser
- Lincoln Envirotown Trust, supported by Lincoln University
The date sits a week before Good Friday (26 March 2027). Both the date and the lecture theatre will be confirmed once the Lincoln University timetable is settled in October 2026.
The evening begins with an hour of networking over refreshments and nibbles, with beverages available from a cash bar, before the formal discussion starts at 7:30 pm. Kim Hill chairs a panel of four, and the discussion is opened to the floor. Live-streaming, with overflow to a second theatre if it is needed, will be decided once the venue is confirmed.
3The panel
Kim Hill
Chair · Broadcaster
Kim Hill is a nationally acclaimed broadcaster whose involvement guarantees a high standard of discourse and lends the event significant public credibility. Chairing the Hot Topic, she draws out the substance of a subject without letting the discussion settle into either advocacy or jargon.
Associate Professor Stuart Charters Confirmed
Applied Computing, Lincoln University
Stuart Charters is Associate Professor in Applied Computing at Lincoln University and Theme Leader for Computational Agroecology at the Centre of Excellence for Designing Future Productive Landscapes. He holds a PhD and a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Durham University in the United Kingdom, and formerly directed the SIGNAL ICT Graduate School, which trained technology professionals for New Zealand.
His research sits at the intersection of technology, agriculture and ecology — the field he terms computational agroecology — alongside the human side of computing: software engineering, visualisation and eResearch. Much of that work concerns how technology is actually deployed on farms and in the environment, and how data can be presented so that people can act on it, on the argument that the ability to engage with technology and interpret data is what determines whether it is adopted at all.
He is a sceptic of the term that gives this Hot Topic its name. In a recent talk, Intelligence Amplification over Artificial Intelligence, he argued that the useful question is not what computers can do instead of people, but how computing can amplify human decision-making, creativity and problem-solving. That is a productive starting position for a panel asked to separate what AI genuinely changes from what is merely being relabelled.
Dr Katharina Dost Confirmed
School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury
Katharina Dost is a Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Canterbury, and a member of the University's Artificial Intelligence Research Group. She read Mathematics and Computer Science at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and took her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Auckland on robustness, fairness and bias mitigation in machine learning. She then held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, leading research on active learning for accelerated scientific discovery, and has worked as a data scientist for the German rail operator DB Fernverkehr.
Her research asks when a machine learning model can be trusted, and answers it from the data rather than the model: selection bias and how to detect and mitigate it, the applicability domain beyond which a model's predictions should not be believed, self-reinforcing bias, adversarial attack, and active learning. Her argument is that recognising the flaws in a dataset early is what improves a model, because it changes what data gets collected next.
She applies these methods to problems in chemistry, health and environmental science. Recent work includes predicting the biotransformation pathways of chemicals in the environment, forecasting hospitalisations from severe respiratory disease, determining when active learning should stop, and measuring regional bias in English language models — a spread that puts her in a good position to speak to both what AI can deliver for the environment and how confidently its outputs should be read.
Third panellist To be confirmed
Invitation in progress
The organising committee is currently approaching candidates for the two remaining places, with the aim of balancing the panel across the technology, energy, primary-sector and public-interest dimensions of the topic.
Fourth panellist To be confirmed
Invitation in progress
This page will be updated as soon as each place is confirmed.
4About the Kim Hill Hot Topic
The annual Kim Hill Hot Topic is held each March at Lincoln University and comprises a robust, thought-provoking debate on a contemporary environmental issue. The series is run by the Lincoln Envirotown Trust and is supported by Lincoln University together with other sponsors who have an interest in the subject of the year. The platform allows a hot topic to be explored with nuance, in a way that is accessible to the public and respected by the experts on the panel.
The event is held in the Stewart Building at Lincoln University and typically attracts around 300 people. The evening begins at 6:30 pm with time for networking before the formal proceedings commence at 7:30 pm, so that the occasion is an active gathering of an engaged community rather than a passive lecture. While a $5 koha is requested at the door, the event is not-for-profit and community-oriented.
The Hot Topic began as part of Earth Hour, which started in Sydney in 2007 to raise awareness of climate change. The Lincoln Envirotown Trust has coordinated the events since 2011; the first was titled “Green Growth or Gas Guzzlers”.
5Previous Hot Topics
- 2026 · 26 March Soil to Brain: Rethinking our connection Julia Rucklidge (University of Canterbury), Carolyn Lister (Bioeconomy Science Institute), Pablo Gregorini (Lincoln University), Hadee Thompson-Morrison (Bioeconomy Science Institute)
- 2025 · 27 March Powering our Future: our social and environmental responsibility Wim de Koning (Lincoln University), Claudia Schneider (University of Canterbury), Pip Newland (Orion Ltd), Nathan Surendran (Schema Consulting Ltd)
Watch the recording
- 2024 · 28 March Plastic: how do we live with it? Rob Wilson (EcoCentral), Rachel Barker (Plastics NZ), Ian Shaw (University of Canterbury), Gavin Lear (University of Auckland)
Watch the recording
- 2023 · 30 March Tourism Reset: environment and wallets — priorities post-Covid Stephen Espiner (Lincoln University), Susanne Becken (DOC), Tyla Harrison-Hunt (Christchurch City Council), Justin Watson (Christchurch Airport)
Watch the recording
- 2021 · 24 March What’s your poison? Pesticides — good or evil? Charles Merfield (Lincoln University), Ian Shaw (University of Canterbury), Mark Ross (Agcarm), Hamish Marr (farmer)
Watch the recording
- 2019 · 1 April Peak Meat: a game changer for food production, the environment and health Nick Pyke (AgInnovate), Ronan Phelan (environmentalist), Jocelyn Eason (Plant & Food Research), Kevin Marshall (Riddet Institute)
Watch the recording
- 2018 · 22 March Soil: are we treating it like dirt? Mike Headley (Massey University), Ants Roberts (Ravensdown), Trish Fraser (Plant & Food Research), Andy MacFarlane (farmer)
Watch the recording
- 2017 · 23 March Water: a global issue affecting New Zealand Bryan Jenkins (Waterways Centre for Freshwater Management), Ken Hughey (Lincoln University), Peter Townsend (Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce), Brent Clothier (Plant & Food Research)
Watch the recording
- 2016 · 17 March Extinction: which species should we save?
6Supporters
The Hot Topic is a not-for-profit community event, made possible by the organisations that support it. Sponsorship for 2027 is still being arranged; the logos below are those carried on the current poster.
The Selwyn District Council also supports the 2027 event; its logo appears on the poster at the top of this page, and can be added to the row above once a logo file is supplied.