--- title: "Climate law meets AI: what we set out to do and why it matters now" date: 2026-06-25T13:23:26Z modified: 2026-06-29T09:08:56Z permalink: "https://chancerylaneproject.org/news/climate-law-meets-ai-what-we-set-out-to-do-and-why-it-matters-now/" type: post status: publish excerpt: "" wpid: 11471 categories: - Legal Design tags: - Legal Design - Adapt and scale featured_image: "https://chancerylaneproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Swiss_Army_Knife_Wenger_Opened_20050627-scaled.jpg" timestamp: 2026-06-29T09:08:56Z --- At The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP), we are actively responding to a rapidly changing landscape. AI agents, LLMs and new tools are emerging at pace, and as a small nonprofit we are working to keep up, adapt and shape our role within it. Our London Climate Action Week events have given us a valuable opportunity to share our work with commercial organisations and peer nonprofits, and to learn directly from how others are approaching these same challenges. Every event that we’ve attended – and what we’ve heard from our own attendees – has felt like this is the question everyone is grappling with. In many ways, we’ve been well placed from the start. Much of our work happens behind the scenes, which has given us direct access to lawyers and legal professionals and how they actually use the tools in their day-to-day practice. That has trained us to constantly scan the horizon—tracking new tools, workflows and commercial shifts, and turning those signals into opportunities for new legal content. So when we began to see traffic shift from human users to a new class of AI agent visitors, we were already positioned to respond and adapt quickly. The funding we’ve received from the [Patrick J. McGovern Foundation](https://www.mcgovern.org/) runs down three parallel tracks: - ​​Expanding TCLP’s digital infrastructure to make our legal knowledge accessible to AI agents and the tools lawyers increasingly use in their daily work. - Delivering the Annotate project with our legal network. Annotate enables lawyers and our pro bono community to classify legal concepts and entities across TCLP’s content, creating a climate-aligned contracting knowledge graph that AI systems can understand and trust. The resulting data improves content discovery, powers our API and supports the development of our AI tools. - Working with our build partner,[ Unboxed](https://unboxed.co/), to identify where digital and AI-enabled interventions can have the greatest impact, ensuring that we focus our efforts where they will deliver the most value for legal professionals and climate action. **What we’ve created** These three strands of work come together in [TCLP Labs](https://labs.chancerylaneproject.org/), where we showcase a growing collection of tools and “provocatypes” – experimental prototypes that explore how climate-aligned legal knowledge can be used in practice. Designed for lawyers, legal professionals and sustainability teams, these experiments help us test how AI, structured legal knowledge and digital infrastructure can make climate-aligned contracting more accessible and effective. We also have our AI tools hosted on Labs: projects with a longer life, maintained and fully functional for use by lawyers and sustainability professionals. We have packaged TCLP’s legal knowledge, drafting guidance and climate-aligned contracting methodology into a [Skill-compatible format that AI models can use directly](https://labs.chancerylaneproject.org/project/climate-aligned-contracts-claude-skill/). By combining our content in Markdown format with a bespoke prompt that reflects our legal approach, we enable models to draft, adapt and update climate clauses and contracts in line with TCLP standards. This capability is already live in Claude for Legal through the [Law.ve](https://lawve.ai/en/skills/climate-aligned-contracts-tclp) plugin and can also be deployed across a wide range of other compatible AI models. [Markdown for Agents ](https://wordpress.org/plugins/markdown-for-agents-and-statistics/)is our open-source WordPress plugin, now deployed on more than 70 websites. It provides AI systems with a clean Markdown version of a site’s content, removing the need to process complex HTML, navigation menus and page formatting. By reducing noise and token usage, it helps AI models access content more efficiently, improving the likelihood that high-quality information is used for training, retrieval and answering user questions **What’s new** And launched this week at London Climate Action week, our first AI-native tools for using our knowledge graph and content within the LLMs themselves. We developed an application programming interface (API) that enables computers, AI systems and applications to search, explore and interrogate TCLP’s knowledge graph, retrieving not only content but also the legal context that surrounds it. For example, a query for “deforestation” returns 24 connected pieces of content. At the top of the results is our [Deforestation and Land Use Change Clause and Questionnaire](https://chancerylaneproject.org/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/clause/deforestation-and-land-use-change-clause-and-questionnaire.md), a model clause within TCLP’s wider framework on environmental performance, incentives and remedies. Alongside it appears the practitioner guide [Ensure Deforestation-Free Supply Chains](https://chancerylaneproject.org/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/guide/ensure-deforestation-free-supply-chains.md), which helps organisations implement the clause in practice. The results also include the glossary entry for [Carbon Sequestration](https://chancerylaneproject.org/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/glossary-term/carbon-sequestration.md), which is linked to a network of related concepts including carbon sinks, ecological restoration, embodied carbon and offsetting. As a result, a search for a single term does not simply return a list of documents. It surfaces relevant clauses, practical guidance, supporting definitions and the wider web of legal and climate concepts that connect them. This is possible because the API searches across three layers simultaneously: the exact words used in the query, the semantic meaning behind those words, and the relationships between concepts captured within the knowledge graph. The result is richer, more contextual answers that help users understand not only what a concept is, but how it relates to the broader landscape of climate-aligned legal practice. To use the API, we’ve launched our Model Context Protocol (MCP) – you can think of this as handing your AI Agent a Swiss Army knife of TCLP tools – search, explore, taxonomy understanding and more. It allows you to create, compare and benchmark content that you want to make more sustainable, or to understand where there might be risks of greenwashing or where obligations to reduce emissions lack teeth. It doesn’t replace a human lawyer, and the years of experience, nuance and understanding that you have. But it does make it easy to get through the boilerplate and initial drafting – to generate ideas you can refine with your experience, and to embed sustainability in your work product easily and reclaim that time to sell why it’s important to your clients, peers and stakeholders. If you’ve made it this far, you’re definitely someone we’d love to have try our MCP – use it, find out where the limits are, share with us the outputs that amazed (or disappointed) you, and help us make the next version even better. [Sign up for access here. ](https://forms.chancerylaneproject.org/s/ai) ## Topics **Categories:** [Legal Design](https://chancerylaneproject.org/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/category/legal-design.md) **Tags:** [Adapt and scale](https://chancerylaneproject.org/wp-content/uploads/wp-mfa-exports/taxonomy/post_tag/adapt-and-scale.md)