Conservation organisations use AI to monitor wildlife and track fires, but also warning that data centres are driving up energy use and water consumption.
Environmental groups worldwide are using artificial intelligence to analyse climate data, track forest fires and monitor endangered wildlife, despite concerns that the technology is increasing electricity demand, water consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions.
The contradiction is forcing organisations to weigh AI's potential benefits against its environmental costs.
“We recognise that AI can come with environmental costs, and we need to be thoughtful about how we use it,” said Ali Swanson, AI lead at US nonprofit Conservation International. But she said the technology could help address increasingly urgent climate and biodiversity crises.
The group recently began using AI to assess satellite-detected hotspots and send real-time alerts to forest patrols about potential wildfires in remote areas of Cambodia.
Reuters interviewed 15 major environmental, conservation, and development organisations. All said they used AI in some form and expressed concern about the environmental impact of the data centres powering it.
The issue is expected to feature at the UN's COP31 climate conference this month, where host Türkiye will urge governments, businesses, and institutions to sign a pledge setting principles for sustainable AI development and deployment.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has also called on major AI companies to disclose their systems' environmental impacts.
Researchers at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health estimate the global data-centre footprint could more than double by 2030, reaching an area roughly twice the size of Jakarta.
The International Energy Agency projects that data centres will consume around 945 terawatt-hours of electricity annually by 2030, producing the equivalent of more than 300 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide. It also estimates annual water consumption could rise from 560 billion litres in 2023 to 1.2 trillion litres by 2030.
Technology companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have reported rising emissions linked partly to data-centre expansion.
AI benefits outweigh its costs
Many organisations told Reuters that AI's benefits currently outweigh its costs because it enables work that was previously difficult, expensive, or impossible.
Kenya's Save the Elephants uses machine learning to improve population surveys and study elephant communication. An aerial survey of the country's largest protected area last year produced around 200,000 images, which took nine people nine months to review manually.
AI models can now complete similar analyses in hours, said chief executive Frank Pope. The technology also revealed that human surveys had missed about a third of elephants, half of zebras, and giraffes, and three-quarters of oryx populations.
More accurate wildlife data can help secure conservation funding, Pope said, adding that AI makes nature “measurable and therefore investable”.
The Jane Goodall Institute is using AI to digitise decades of handwritten field notes on chimpanzee behaviour in Tanzania's Gombe National Park. A project once expected to take 13 to 15 years can now be completed in about two years using a tool developed with Amazon Web Services.
The institute's vice president of conservation science, Lilian Pintea, said Goodall had supported AI in conservation research, provided humans remained in control of its use.
“AI technology should be seen as tools which are human-centred,” Pintea said.
Limiting the environmental impact
Some organisations are experimenting with ways to reduce AI's environmental footprint.
The World Resources Institute limits resource-intensive applications such as video and image generation and stores AI query results so identical searches do not need to be processed repeatedly.
The Nature Conservancy uses AI to analyse footage from commercial fishing vessels, but processes the information aboard the ships rather than uploading large volumes of video to centralised data centres. This reduces energy use and data transfers, said senior scientist Vienna Saccomanno.
Greenpeace International also uses some AI tools, mainly through software platforms that include AI features. It has introduced internal guidelines emphasising transparency, human oversight and deliberate use, while opposing the expansion of data centres.
“While other organisations are asking how to use AI responsibly, Greenpeace is asking whether it's necessary to build all these massive data centres in the first place,” said climate and energy campaigner Katrin Xueying Wu.
Other groups argue that environmental organisations cannot afford to ignore the technology.
“It's our job to save the planet. If we can do that more effectively and efficiently with the limited resources we've got by using AI, then we have to seriously engage in that possibility,” said Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at UK-based BirdLife International.
“If we don't do it, then we're sort of being derelict in our duty.”
TRT World / Reuters — TRT World / Reuters
Photo: Reuters
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