AI is increasingly being used to deal with climate change, but it has its own emissions problem

On a farm in St. Peters Bay, P.E.I., a black four-wheeled rover with two extended arms trundles through a row of thigh-high green leaves, its giant tires kick‐ ing up the red dirt of a potato field. It looks as though it belongs more at home on a dusty, red Mart‐ ian landscape than on a farm.

"Actually, there were a few people who stopped on the road to see what was going on," said Aitazaz Farooque, the interim associate dean of the University of Prince Ed‐ ward Island's (UPEI) school of climate change and adapta‐ tion.

Meet the AgriRobot, a robot that has been trained using artificial intelligence to identify disease in potato plants.

Farooque leads a team of researchers at UPEI (in part‐ nership with the governmen‐ ts of P.E.I. and New Brunswick) who are using AI in new and innovative ways. The AgriRobot was the brain‐ child of Charan Preet Singh, who is a master's student in the university's sustainable design engineering depart‐ ment.

"It will generate a map with the location information so that even if somebody has to go in, they don't have to be trained ... they can load that map on their cellphone," Farooque said. "It will direct you where those infected plants are and get those out."

As the climate changes, farmers are facing more chal‐ lenges than ever before. From floods, droughts and disease to warmer tempera‐ tures and shifts within the growing and harvesting sea‐ sons, the agriculture busi‐ ness is rapidly changing, which means farmers - and technology - need to con‐ stantly keep up.

But there is an irony: While AI is helping in climate adaptation and mitigation, it has its own emissions prob‐ lem. And it is one that will on‐ ly grow as AI is used for more and more applications.

AI takes lots of comput‐ ers - and energy

"AI is being used in all sorts of ways to address climate action," said Priya Donti, cofounder and chair of Climate Change AI, a global nonprofit organization that ex‐ amines the use of AI in the climate sphere.

"From helping us better forecast solar and wind on the power grid to help us better integrate those into power grids ... to helping us map things like deforestation and emissions using global satellite imagery in order to understand where deforesta‐ tion is occurring or emissions are occurring in real time."

AI runs on computers - a lot of them - that are hosted in data centres around the world. As the AI models run, they need electricity. If that electricity comes from a grid that uses fossil fuels, it is contributing to emissions.

At the same time, the computers in those data cen‐ tres generate a lot of heat and need to be cooled - often requiring even more electric‐ ity.

"Running AI is running any other computer program. You have an input, you want an output," said Yacine Jer‐ nite, a researcher in New York who works for Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source platforms where AI models are shared.

"It's going to do lots and lots of operations. And doing lots of operations for one an‐ swer means that there's a lot of energy and electricity con‐ sumed by the computer run‐ ning those operations."

The problem is, nobody really knows how much AI ac‐ counts for emissions in those data centres.

"We really have to be on the lookout for the growth in AI emissions footprint," Don‐ ti, based in Cambridge, Mass., said.

"And fundamentally, one thing that is challenging and getting ahold of is that there isn't enough transparency among data centre providers, among machine learning en‐ tities that are actually creat‐ ing machine learning algo‐ rithms in terms of actually monitoring and measuring those greenhouse gas emis‐ sions."

WATCH | Breaking down the climate impact of AI:

Predicting wildfires be‐ fore they start

As we face an ongoing cli‐ mate crisis, scientists are at‐ tempting to come up with ways to help us deal with the consequences.

In the Global South, locust outbreaks are increasing, threatening food security. A new tool called Kuzi is helping farmers by providing real-time data using satel‐ lites, soil moisture, surface temperature, humidity and more to predict potential outbreaks. It can then send a notification to farmers on their cellphones.

And as wildfire risk grows, engineers and scientists are coming up with new tools to sense and even predict when they start.

Dryad Networks, a com‐ pany based in Germany, has developed solar-powered sensors that can sniff out a fire even before a flame breaks out.

"Behind [the] membrane ... is a gas sensor that is sen‐ sitive to hydrogen, carbon monoxide and volatile or‐ ganic compounds," said com‐ pany CEO Carsten Brinkschulte. "So it actually is like an electronic nose that can actually smell a fire. And here's where AI comes into the play: We are running AI in the sensor, to actually make it recognize pre-trained ma‐ chine learning models that have been trained for the smell of fire."

The company has already deployed 20,000 around the world, with a pilot project in part of California's forests. Brinkschulte said Dryad is al‐ so beginning a pilot project with an unnamed organiza‐ tion.

AI comes at a cost to the environment

AI has tremendous potential, experts say, but first there needs to be a better idea of how much it is contributing to emissions - and transition‐ ing to renewables.

"We both need to green the grid, and we need to make serious choices about both how we make AI models more efficient for the places where we'll use them," Donti, of Climate Change AI, said.

"But also, like we have to do for every sector, re-evalu‐ ate which uses are worth the electricity that's coming in."

And this extends to per‐ sonal use of AI, because not all AI usage is the same. Showing it two pictures, one of a dog and one of a cat, and asking it to pick out the cat uses a lot less energy than asking it to create or cal‐ culate something.

While we may have fun creating filters for ourselves or asking questions of gener‐ ative AI like ChatGPT, it comes with a cost in terms of emissions. In fact, one study suggests that every time AI generates an image, it's using enough energy to charge a cellphone.

"We definitely shouldn't kind of view AI as a cost-less

thing," Donti said. "I think it's very easy to view with this abstract thing on your com‐ puter that doesn't have any impact, but it does."

WATCH | Inside the Uni‐ versity of Prince Edward Is‐ land's climate change lab: