GCA Framework: A GCC Countries-Grounded Dataset and Agentic Pipeline for Climate Decision Support
Organizations: Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), UAE · University of Missouri, USA · Australian National University, Australia · Linköping University, Sweden
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 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.
Figures & tables
| Dataset | Size | Automated | Validated | Multimodal | Region | Remote Sensing | Topic Covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Climate Crisis QA (2024) | 19,241 | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | General | ✗ | 5 |
| Pirá 2.0 (2024) | 2,250 | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | General | ✗ | 4 |
| Climate-FEVER (2020) | 1,535 | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | General | ✗ | 3 |
| CPIQA (2025) | 54,612 | ✓ | Partial | ✓ | General | ✗ | 5 |
| ELLE (2025) | 1,130 | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | General | ✗ | 6 |
| ClimaQA-Gold (2025) | 566 | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | General | ✗ | 5 |
| Model | Format Err. (%) | Arg. Err. (%) | N/A (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5 | 19.8 | 11.9 | 6.4 |
| Claude 4.5 Sonnet | 18.6 | 14.7 | 7.1 |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | 21.3 | 16.5 | 6.8 |
| Qwen2.5-VL 7B | 46.7 | 38.2 | 21.5 |
| Pixtral-12B | 39.4 | 29.8 | 15.2 |
| GCA (ours) | 12.7 | 8.3 | 3.9 |
| Model | Step-by-Step Mode | End-to-End Mode | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| InstAcc | ToolAcc | ArgAcc | SummAcc | AnsAcc | AnsAcc+I | |
| GPT-5 | 88.6 | 92.3 | 90.2 | 87.4 | 86.3 | 87.0 |
| Claude 4.5 Sonnet | 86.8 | 90.2 | 88.3 | 85.6 | 84.3 | 84.8 |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | 85.9 | 89.4 | 87.2 | 84.7 | 83.2 | 84.1 |
| Qwen2.5-VL 7B | 60.5 | 62.2 | 58.3 | 55.6 | 52.3 | 54.0 |
| Pixtral-12B | 66.9 | 68.3 | 64.2 | 60.8 | 56.2 | 58.5 |
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Tool | Purpose | Inputs | Outputs |
| Remote sensing and land surface | |||
| get_satellite_ image | Retrieve a multispectral satellite image for a coordinate and date, used for downstream index and change analyses. | lat, lon, date | image + metadata. |
| calculate_ ndvi | Compute NDVI from an image to quantify vegetation condition (scalar map + summary). | image | ndvi_map + stats. |
| calculate_ ndwi | Compute NDWI from an image to highlight water/moisture signals (scalar map + summary). | image | ndwi_map + stats. |
| desertification_ analysis | Compare two images and return land-degradation indicators (e.g., index deltas and affected area). | image1, image2 | change_map + metrics. |
| Biodiversity and species | |||
LLM Grounding
Large language model (LLM) grounding studies how models anchor answers and actions in evidence, structured knowledge, and real-world context.
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