What happened
Reuters interviewed 15 major environmental, conservation and development organizations; all said they use AI and all voiced concern about the environmental impact of the data centers running it.
Why it matters
Their use of a technology they warn drives up electricity demand, water use and greenhouse-gas emissions forces them to justify it as they pursue climate and conservation missions.
WHO IT HITSConservation and environmental advocacy organizations that rely on AI for climate analysis and wildlife monitoring face a credibility challenge, because the same tool they use to speed up their work is tied to the energy and water demands they publicly criticize.
Summaries like this, every morning.
The survey lands as the environmental cost of AI is moving onto the public agenda. The U.N.'s COP31 climate conference this month in Turkey will see host Turkey call on governments, businesses and other institutions to sign a pledge outlining principles for sustainable AI development and deployment, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wants major AI companies to publicly disclose their systems' environmental impacts. Against that backdrop, the groups' unanimous concern about data centers is awkward for organizations whose missions depend on credible environmental positions. Some are already adjusting how they compute: the World Resources Institute limits resource-intensive applications such as generating videos and images and caches AI query results, while the Nature Conservancy has installed AI-powered digital cameras on fishing vessels to process video aboard rather than uploading it to centralized data centers. Greenpeace International goes further, saying it would prefer to sidestep the technology due to its environmental impacts and is pushing back hard on the data center buildout.
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