Late in July this year, we ran a free online briefing on the Environmental Impacts of AI, partly in response to inbound queries on the topic from people in roles where they were expected to adopt AI, without being given much in the way of information about the environmental impacts of doing so. We were quite happy with the feedback from the session, so we’ve put the webinar online for others to view as well. Director of Technology and Policy Chris Adams gives the low down.
A little background on the briefing
Since 2022, we’ve been publishing on the topic of the environmental impacts of AI in various forms, from our initial research on the use of AI to accelerate oil and gas extraction in the Fog of Enactment report, to our first report in September 2024 on the direct impacts of using AI, and the steps you can take to mitigate them.
We’ve also been delivering private, paid briefings over the last 18 months to organisations requesting them, and on July 29th, we published our first recorded public session – a “taster” briefing on the Environmental Impacts of AI.
In the session, Green Web Foundation director of technology and policy Chris Adams, and senior programme manager Katrin Fritsch delivered a 1 hour briefing, consisting of a 30 min long, insight-dense briefing, interspersed with live responses from the audience to polls in the session, followed by a moderated QnA session.
What did we cover?
During the briefing we covered the following topics:
- 💡A high-level overview of the key issues related to the environmental impacts of AI.
- ⚖️ Key existing and upcoming laws in Europe and beyond, plus the standards used for disclosure.
- 🛠️ Commonly used tools ranging from free and open (yay!), to closed and paid to estimate impacts.
- 📉 What the implications are if you have decarbonisation targets or other commitments to do digital more sustainably.
This briefing was intended as an introduction to the subject, with pointers to future, deeper, reading and research depending on your context. Attendees received a copy of the deck, with plentiful links in the speaker notes.
For those wanting a deeper dive, we maintain a public, curated, carefully tagged and categorised repository of the reports, papers and other literature we are reading in the form of the Green Web Library – an open Zotero library that anyone can see and search. This is intended for others can follow along with our research.
How can I get the briefing?
As an experiment, we’re placing this briefing on a few select video sharing sites, starting with Youtube. Follow the link below to see the video.
If you want more – a deep dive on one of the topics, or a variant tailored to your organisational context
We provide advisory and training services on this topic to organisations wanting to engage with this topic, from providing tailored versions of briefings like this one to meet their own internal communication needs, or deep dives on a specific subject.
Disclosure support – a second opinion before going live with public reports and disclosure
For the growing numbers of organisations that are covered by regulation around the world that requires them to disclose on the environmental impact of their digital services they use or build, we now provide a disclosure support service, providing:
- a friendly, hype-free sense check on the numbers you have used
- an honest review of where the gaps might be in your disclosure ahead of any public challenge, and where you might look in future to address them
- expert opinion and assurance of the methodologies used for your reporting.
If these sound interesting to you, get in touch.
