L 58/1422
EN
Official Journal of the European Union
23.2.2023
COMMISSION PILOT PROJECTS
CHAPTER PP 02 — EUROPEAN STRATEGIC INVESTMENTS (cont'd) PP 02 23
(cont'd)
PP 02 23 03
(cont'd) AI has a strong potential for environmental impact.
On the positive side, AI and data analytics technologies have the potential to accelerate the analysis of large volumes of data, enabling better understanding of environmental challenges and providing solutions to them.
This will provide mechanisms for improved environmental planning, decision-making and monitoring of environmental threats.
Specifically, AI could help reduce energy and resource consumption, promote decarbonisation and boost the circular economy.
Another interesting aspect is the use of AI to analyse the results of past scientific experiments and make future experiments more successful.
On the negative side, AI also poses a number of environmental threats.
The use of ICT solutions accounts for 5-9% of electricity consumption worldwide, and could reach 20% by 2030, according to the European Parliament report "The role of Artificial Intelligence in the European Green Deal" .
In practice, this represented between 1,1 and 1,3 billion tonnes (Gt) of CO2 in 2020.
In addition, the ‘Ethics for sustainable AI adoption connecting AI and ESG’ study showed that the carbon emissions for training a single natural language processing model was equivalent to 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing .
With specific reference to the use of AI, some scientific articles on its environmental impact differentiate between red AI, or energy-intensive AI, and green AI, designed following energy efficiency parameters.
By way of illustration, it is worth noting that the computing resources needed to train AI models have been doubling every 3.4 months since 2012, as more accurate models are sought.
The factors driving this increase in consumption can be summarised in three: the cost of running an AI model in isolation, the size of the training dataset and the number of hyperparameter experiments performed.
The Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence review 2021 focus area ‘Bring AI into play for climate and environment’ includes actions aiming at advancing greener AI.
These actions include supporting research on reducing the energy consumption of AI through the Horizon Europe programme; and developing low-power processors for AI applications through Horizon Europe and the institutionalised European Partnership on Key Digital Technologies.
However, the Coordinated Plan does not focus on incentivising developers to use green AI.
In this context, this pilot project aims to carry out a study to define elements to incentivise AI developers to change from energy-intensive AI towards environmentally sustainable AI -green AI-, promoting procedures for better efficiency and indicating the carbon footprint of an AI system, including the exploration of an ‘energy efficiency and carbon intensity marking’ and a ‘green AI label’.
This way, this study will contribute forming the bulk of the activities needed for the greening of AI so that it can serve as a basis for a potential European green algorithms programme or for any green AI legislation that may be considered in the future.
The proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act does not include any incentives or obligations to calculate and simulate the environmental impact of AI systems, so this study would not be overlapping any current action, programme or existing law.
Implementation
The main activities of the study would focus on the identification and further development of non-technological solutions to mitigate the environmental impact arising from the use of AI solutions, such as the development of best practice procedures, tools and the knowledge base necessary to meet this challenge.
Specifically, as the energy consumption and carbon intensity of AI systems is emerging as the main environmental problem, the following activities are envisage in order to incentivise developers/providers to change: