Environmental groups embrace AI even as they warn of data center impacts, Reuters finds

Environmental groups worldwide are using artificial intelligence to analyze climate data, track forest fires and count endangered wildlife, while warning that the same technology is driving a surge in electricity demand, water use and greenhouse-gas emissions, Reuters reported. The news agency interviewed 15 major environmental, conservation and development organizations; all said they use AI in some form, and all expressed concern about the environmental impact of the data centers powering it.

How the groups use AI

US nonprofit Conservation International recently began using AI to assess hotspots detected by satellites and send real-time wildfire alerts to community forest patrols in remote parts of Cambodia. "We recognize that AI can come with environmental costs, and we need to be thoughtful about how we use it," said Ali Swanson, the group's AI lead.

Frank Pope, chief executive of Kenya's Save the Elephants, said a 2017 aerial survey of Kenya's largest protected area generated roughly 200,000 images that took nine people nine months to review by hand; AI models can now complete similar analyses in hours. The results showed that human surveys had missed about a third of the elephants, roughly half of the zebras and giraffes, and three-quarters of oryx. At the Jane Goodall Institute, a tool developed with Amazon Web Services is digitizing decades of handwritten chimpanzee field notes from Tanzania's Gombe National Park, cutting a project once expected to take 13 to 15 years to about two.

Limiting the footprint

The International Energy Agency estimates global data centers will consume about 945 terawatt-hours of electricity a year by 2030 — double current consumption and roughly equal to Japan's annual use — and that their water consumption will rise from about 560 billion liters in 2023 to about 1.2 trillion liters a year by 2030.

The World Resources Institute said it limits resource-intensive uses such as generating video and images and caches query results so identical searches are not reprocessed. The Nature Conservancy processes fishing-vessel video on board with AI-enabled cameras rather than uploading it to central data centers. Greenpeace International said it uses some AI tools embedded in its software, but questions whether the massive data center buildout is necessary at all.

The trade-offs are expected to draw attention at the UN's COP31 climate conference this month, where host Turkey will invite governments, businesses and other institutions to sign a pledge on sustainable AI development. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called on major AI companies to publicly disclose their systems' environmental impacts.

Sources: Reuters, Investing.com / Reuters