Ecological Impacts
— Starting Points
Berreby, D. 2024. “As Use of A.I. Soars, So Does the Energy and Water It Requires.” YaleEnvironment360 (Feb 6, 2024).
Crawford. K. 2024. “Generative AI’s Environmental Costs Are Soaring — and Mostly Secret.” Nature 626: 693 (Feb 20, 2024).
Luccioni, S., L. Trevelin, and M. Mitchell. 2024. “The Environmental Impacts of AI — Primer.” Hugging Face (AI platform blog) (Sept 3, 2024).
Milmo, D. 2024. “Google’s Emissions Climb Nearly 50% in Five Years Due to AI Energy Demand.” The Guardian (July 2, 2024).
Obrien, I. 2024. “Data Center Emissions Probably 662% Higher than Big Tech Claims. Can It Keep Up the Ruse?” The Guardian (Sept 15, 2024).
Stokel-Walker, C. 2024. “Concerned About Your Data Use? Here Is the Carbon Footprint of an Average Day of Emails, WhatsApps and More.” The Guardian (Oct 31, 2024).
United Nations Environment Programme. 2024. “AI Has an Environmental Problem. Here’s What the World Can Do about That.” UNEP Newletter (Sept 21, 2024).
United Nations Environment Programme. 2024. “Artificial Intelligence (AI) End-to-End: The Environmental Impact of the Full AI Life Cycle Needs to be Comprehensively Assessed.” Issue Note (21 September 2024). Nairobi: UNEP.
Zhang, M. 2024. “Data Center Water Usage: A Comprehensive Guide.” DGTL Infra (Jan 17, 2024).
Bruna, N. 2023. “Green Extractivism and Expropriation of Emission Rights: Are Rural Workers in the Global South Subsidizing the Next Leap of Postcolonial Capitalism?” Berliner Gazette (Nov 23, 2023).
Erdenesanaa, D. 2023. “A.I. Could Soon Need as Much Electricity as an Entire Country.” The New York Times (Oct 23, 2023).
Lehuedé, S. 2022. “Big Tech’s New Headache: Data Centre Activism Flourishes Across the World.” Media@LSE Blog (Nov 2, 2022).
Monserrate, S.G. 2022. “The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud.” The MIT Press Reader (Feb 14, 2022).
Schütze, P. 2022. “Mining the Future? The Artificial Intelligence of Climate Breakdown.” Berliner Gazette Blog, Mediapart (May 26, 2022.)
Walkley, S. 2022. “The Carbon Cost of Email.” Our News [blog]. The Carbon Literacy Project (Sept 2022).
Chan, D. 2021. “Your Website is Killing the Planet.” WIRED (Mar 22, 2021).
Cohen, J. 2021. “These Are the Worst (and Best) Websites for Carbon Emissions.” PCMag (May 21, 2021).
Anair, D., J. Martin, M. C. Pinto de Moura, and J. Goldman. 2020 “Ride-Hailing’s Climate Risks: Steering a Growing Industry Toward a Clean Transportation Future.” Union of Concerned Scientists (February 2020).
Donaghy, T., C. Henderson, and E. Jardim.“ 2020. Oil in the Cloud: How Tech Companies Are Helping Big Oil Profit from Climate Destruction.” Greenpeace Reports (May 19, 2020).
Griffiths, S. 2020. “Why Your Internet Habits Are Not as Clean as You Think.” BBC (Mar 5, 2020).
Dobbe, R. and M. Whittaker. 2019. “AI and Climate Change: How They’re Connected, and What We Can Do about It.” AI Now Institute (Oct 17, 2019).
Jones, N. 2018. “How to Stop Data Centres from Gobbling up the World’s Electricity.” Nature (Sept 12, 2018).
— Research Articles and Books
1. Quantitative and Applied Studies
Al Kez, D. et al. 2022. “Exploring the Sustainability Challenges Facing Digitalization and Internet Data Centers.”Journal of Cleaner Production 371 (15 Oct 2022): 133633.
Andrae, A., & Edler, T. 2015. “On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030.” Challenges 6(1): 117–157.
Aslan, J. et al. 2018. “Electricity Intensity of Internet Data Transmission: Untangling the Estimates.”Journal of Industrial Ecology 22, 4 (01 Aug 2018): 785-798.
Batmunkh, A. 2022. “Carbon Footprint of the Most Popular Social Media Platforms.”Sustainability 14, 4: 2195.
Belkhir, L., and A. Elmeligi. 2018. “Assessing ICT Global Emissions Footprint: Trends to 2040 & Recommendations.”Journal of Cleaner Production 177 (10 Mar 2018): 448-463.
Bieser, J.C.T. and L.M. Hilty. 2018. “Assessing Indirect Environmental Effects of Information and Communication Technology (ICT): A Systematic Literature Review.” Sustainability 10, 8: 2662.
de Vries, A. 2023. “The Growing Energy Footprint of Artificial Intelligence.” Joule 7, 10: 2191-94.
Gupta, U. et al. 2021. “Chasing Carbon: The Elusive Environmental Footprint of Computing.” In 2021 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA 2021): 854-867.
Hilty, L. M. and B. Aebischer (eds). 2015. ICT Innovations for Sustainability, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing v310. New York: Springer.
Itten, R., R. Hischier, A.S.G. Andrae et al. 2020. “Digital Transformation—Life Cycle Assessment of Digital Services, Multifunctional Devices and Cloud Computing.” International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 25, 2093–2098 (2020).
Li, P., J. Yang, M. A. Islam, and S. Ren. 2023. “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models.” Arxiv.org preprint (Oct 29, 2023).
Luccioni, A. S., S. Viguier, and A-L. Ligozat. 2022. “Estimating the Carbon Footprint of BLOOM, A 176B Parameter Language Model.”
Luccioni, A, Y. Jernite, and E. Strubell. 2024. “Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?” FAccT ’24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (June 5, 2024), 85-99.
Malmodin, J. and D. Lundén. 2018. “The Energy and Carbon Footprint of the Global ICT and E&M Sectors 2010–2015.” Sustainability 10, 9 (25 Aug 2018): 3027.
Obringer, R. et al. 2021. “The Overlooked Environmental Footprint of Increasing Internet Use.” Resources, Conservation and Recycling 167 (April 2021): 105389.
Pirson, T. and D. Bol. 2021. “Assessing the Embodied Carbon Footprint of IoT Edge Devices with a Bottom-up Life-cycle Approach.”Journal of Cleaner Production 322 (1 Nov 2021): 128966.
Reyes-García, V. et al. 2022. “Decarbonizing the Academic Sector: Lessons from an International Research Project.”Journal of Cleaner Production 368 (25 Sep 2022): 133174.
Sheldon, T. L., and R. Dua. 2024. “Impacts of Ride-Hailing on Energy and the Environment: A Systematic Review.” Environmental Research Letters 19, 4 (043004).
Schwartz, R., J. Dodge, N. A. Smith, and O. Etzione. 2020. Creating Efficiency in AI Research Will Decrease Its Carbon Footprint and Increase Its Inclusivity as Deep Learning Study Should Not Require the Deepest Pockets. Communications of the ACM 63, 12: 54-63.
van Wynsberghe, A.. 2021. “Sustainable AI: AI for Sustainability and the Sustainability of AI.” AI and Ethics 1: 213-218.
Widdicks, K. et al. 2019. “Streaming, Multi-Screens and YouTube: The New (Unsustainable) Ways of Watching in the Home.” CHI ’19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Paper No 466. May 2019: 1-13.
Verdecchia, R., J. Sallou, and L. Cruz. 2023. “A Systematic Review of Green AI.” WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 13, 4: e1507.
Wu, C-J. et al. 2022. “Sustainable AI: Environmental Implications, Challenges and Opportunities.” Proceedings of Machine Learning and Systems 4: 795-813.
2. Critical Assessments in the Social Sciences
Bakker, K., & M. Ritts. 2018. “Smart Earth: A Meta-review and Implications for Environmental Governance.” Global Environmental Change 52, 201–211.
Bresnihan, P., and P. Brodie. 2023. “Data Sinks, Carbon Services: Waste, Storage and Energy Cultures on Ireland’s Peat Bogs.” New Media & Society 25, 2: 361-383.
Brevini, B. 2022. Is AI Good for the Planet? Medford, MA: Polity Press.
Brevini, B. 2020. “Black Boxes, Not Green: Mythologizing Artificial Intelligence and Omitting the Environment.” Big Data Soc. 7, 2.
Brevini, B. and G. Murdock (eds). 2018. Carbon Capitalism and Communication: Confronting Climate Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brodie, P. 2023. “Data Infrastructure Studies on an Unequal Planet.” Big Data & Society 10, 1.
Brodie, P. 2020. “Climate Extraction and Supply Chains of Data.” Media, Culture & Society 42, 7-8: 1095-1114.
Cournet, P. and N. S. Bensi (eds). 2023. Datapolis: Exploring the Footprint of Data on Our Planet and Beyond. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
Crawford, K. 2021. The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dauvergne, P. 2022. “Is Artificial Intelligence Greening Global Supply Chains? Exposing the Political Economy of Environmental Costs.” Rev. Int. Polit. Econ. 29, 3: 696-718.
—. 2020. AI in the Wild: Sustainability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Furlong, K. 2021. “Geographies of Infrastructure II: Concrete, Cloud and Layered (In) Visibilities.” Progr. Human Geogr. 45, 1: 190–198.
Gabrys, J. 2020. “Smart Forests and Data Practices: From the Internet of Trees to Planetary Governance.” Big Data & Society 7, 1.
—. 2016. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Electronic Mediations 49. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Goldstein, J., and E. Nost (eds). 2022. The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Hogan, M. 2015. “Data Flows and Water Woes: The Utah Data Center.” Big Data & Society 2, 2.
Hristova, T., B. Neilson and N. Rossiter (eds). 2022. Data Farms: Circuits, Labour, Territory. London: Open Humanities Press.
Kloppenburg, S., A. Gupta, S.R.L. Kruk, S. Makris, R. Bergsvik, P. Korenhof, H. Solman, and H.M. Toonen. 2022. “Scrutinizing Environmental Governance in a Digital Age: New Ways of Seeing, Participating, and Intervening.” One Earth 5, 3: 232-241.
Kovacic, Z., C. García Casañas, L. Argüelles, P. Yáñez Serrano, R. Ribera-Fumaz, L. Prause, and H. March. 2024. “The Twin Green and Digital Transition: High-Level Policy or Science Fiction?” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 0, 0: https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241258046.
Lehuedé, S. 2024. “An Elemental Ethics for Artificial Intelligence: Water as Resistance Within AI’s Value Chain.” AI & Society.
Levenda, A.M. and D. Mahmoudi. 2019. “Silicon Forest and Server Farms: The (Urban) Nature of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest.” Culture Machine.
Machen, R. and E. Nost. 2021. “Thinking Algorithmically: The Making of Hegemonic Knowledge in Climate Governance.” Trans. Inst. British Geogr. 46, 3: 555–569.
Mejia-Muñoz, S. and S. Babidge. 2023. “Lithium Extractivism: Perpetuating Historical Asymmetries in the ‘Green Economy.'” Third World Quarterly 44, 6: 1119–1136.
Monserrate, S.G. 2022. “The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage.” MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, no. Winter 2022 (January).
Murdock G. and B. Brevini. 2019. “Communications and the Capitalocene: Disputed Ecologies, Contested Economies, Competing Futures.” The Political Economy of Communication 7, 1: 51–82.
Nost, E. and E. Colven. 2022. “Earth for AI: A Political Ecology of Data-Driven Climate Initiatives.” Geoforum 130: 23-34.
Pasek, A. 2019. “Managing Carbon and Data Flows: Fungible Forms of Mediation in the Cloud.” Culture Machine.
Pasek, A., H. Vaughan, and N. Starosielski. 2023. “The World Wide Web of Carbon: Toward a Relational Footprinting of Information and Communications Technology’s Climate Impacts.” Big Data & Society 10, 1.
Robbins, S. and A. van Wynsberghe. 2022. “Our New Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure: Becoming Locked into an Unsustainable Future.” Sustainability 14, 8 (18 Apr 2022): 4829.
Sætra, H.S. 2021. “AI in Context and the Sustainable Development Goals: Factoring in the Unsustainability of the Sociotechnical System.” Sustainability 13:1738.
Schrader, N. and J. Seijdel (eds). 2023. Acid Clouds: A Critical Atlas of Dutch Data Centres. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
Taffel, S. 2023. “Data and Oil: Metaphor, Materiality and Metabolic Rifts.” New Media & Society 25, 5: 980-998.
Taffel, S. 2023. “AirPods and the Earth: Digital Technologies, Planned Obsolescence and the Capitalocene.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 6, 1: 433-454.
Voskoboynik, D. M. and D. Andreucci. 2022. “Greening Extractivism: Environmental Discourses and Resource Governance in the ‘Lithium Triangle.’” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5, 2: 787-809.