7 hours Ago By Cian Etherington
As 2024 comes to an end, we’re taking a look at some of the biggest issues shaping our world. 2024 was the year when AI became virtually omnipresent. While the technology has been widely criticised for its environmental impact, a growing number of sectors have started channelling these systems in sustainable technology.
With AI’s ability to analyse large amounts of data, these systems are able to scan through millions of possibilities to choose the most efficient materials for building sustainable products. Sustainable farming, too, can be optimised through AI-driven precision agriculture, optimising the use of water, fertilisers and pesticides through data from satellite imagery, weather forecasts and soil sensors. AI is also a great tool to monitor the effects of climate change.
According to the European Space Agency, AI is capable of mapping large Atlantic icebergs in satellite images in one-hundredth of a second – 10,000 times faster than a human, thus allowing us to know exactly how fast the icecaps are melting. With this same technology, the Scottish company Space Intelligence has also been able to map the impact of deforestation on the climate crisis. To protect communities facing climate risks, AI has also become a vital tool: the United Nations’ IKI Project, for example, uses this technology to predict weather patterns in Burundi, Chad and Sudan, allowing for communities to plan their adaptation to climate change more efficiently.
As reported by Reuters, AI is also being used in Rio de Janeiro to reforest the area, analysing the soils and native species before sending out a drone to disperse seeds. With the widespread rise of wind farming (wind farms provided 32% of Ireland’s electricity in the first ten months of 2024), the use of AI in the struggle to boost clean electricity might be a game-changer. In this industry, AI could predict failures in wind farms, or calculate power curve changes, allowing for an even more efficient use of natural resources.
No matter how helpful to sustainable technology, though, AI’s own environmental impact cannot be ignored: data centres housing AI servers produce astonishing amounts of electronic waste, and the training process for an AI model can consume thousands of megawatt hours of electricity and emit hundreds of tons of carbon. If this trend continues, AI’s energy demand could exceed the annual electricity of a small country like Belgium, according to the Harvard Business Review. And even though global efforts are being made to limit the environmental impact of AI, the distribution of those efforts are incredibly unequal depending on the region.
In 2022, for example, Google managed to operate its data centre in Finland on 97% carbon-free energy, compared to 4–18% for its data centres in Asia. Nothing but the same old story..
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