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 kicking up the red dirt of a potato field. It looks as though it belongs more at home on a dusty, red Martian 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 Edward Island's (UPEI) school of climate change and adaptation.

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 partnership with the governments of P.E.I. and New Brunswick) who are using AI in new and innovative ways. The AgriRobot was the brainchild of Charan Preet Singh, who is a master's student in the university's sustainable design engineering department.

"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 challenges than ever before. From floods, droughts and disease to warmer temperatures and shifts within the growing and harvesting seasons, the agriculture business is rapidly changing, which means farmers — and technology — need to constantly keep up.

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

"AI is being used in all sorts of ways to address climate action," said Priya Donti, co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI, a global non-profit organization that examines 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 deforestation 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 centres generate a lot of heat and need to be cooled — often requiring even more electricity.

"Running AI is running any other computer program. You have an input, you want an output," said Yacine Jernite, 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 answer means that there's a lot of energy and electricity consumed by the computer running those operations."

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