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- UN warns AI's environmental footprint is much, much more than just energy
- AI data centers could consume the water equivalent of 1.3b people by 2030
- Report calls for more diverse reporting and robust governance to protect people
A new UN report is arguing artificial intelligence's impacts are far from parity – instead, that its environmental impact is being underestimated because most discussions only focus on carbon emissions.
Instead, the United Nations is urging companies, investors and governments to also include water consumption and land use in their evaluations.
This comes as AI data centers alone are expect to consume 945TWh of electricity by 2030 – the equivalent of 1.95b homes, or three times the population of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria.
UN is worried about AI's environmental impacts
Electricity aside, the UN is also warning that their water consumption by the end of the decade would be equal to 1.3b people in Sub-Saharan Africa (9.3 trillion liters), and the land use could equate to 14,500 square kilometers (twice as big as Jakarta, home to 32m people).
But it's far more than the environment alone that the AI industry is putting under pressure – unlike conventional software, artificial intelligence leans heavily on physical data center campuses, grid connections, cooling systems and semiconductors, expanding its impacts heavily across both Scope 2 and Scope 3.
Professor Kaveh Madani, Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, stressed that the report should serve as a blocker to AI. Instead, Madani calls for responsibility and sustainability.
"We have a narrow window to ensure that the backbone of the technological revolution of our era develops within planetary limits, and that the communities who provide the critical minerals for advancing AI and the ones that host its infrastructure and e-waste are also among those who benefit from it."
Interestingly, while much of the debate often centers around model training, researchers now believe inference (the everyday use after deployment) accounts for around 80-90% of AI's energy demand. ChatGPT alone is said to process around 2.5b prompts per day, and energy demand is only increasing as response quality improves.
Looking ahead, the UN is called for the mandatory reporting of carbon, land and water footprints as well as 'efficiency by design' approaches. The paper also encourages stronger governance to prevent the environmental costs from being shifted onto the most vulnerable communities.
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