Environmental Impact of AI

AALL’s Environment and Climate Change Caucus:

Artificial Intelligence & Environmental Impact Open Access Resource Review

(Updated as of June 2026; in Bluebook citation format)

Libguides

Ithaka S+R, Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence: LibGuide Overview, https://guides.jstor.org/sr-environmental-literacy-AI (last visited June 10, 2026). 

News

Adam Zewe, Explained: Generative AI's Environmental Impact, MIT News (Jan. 17, 2025), https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117.

Beth Stackpole, AI has High Data Center Energy Costs – But There are Solutions, MIT Mgmt., Sloan Sch. (Jan. 7, 2025), https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/ai-has-high-data-center-energy-costs-there-are-solutions#:~:text=from%20rethinking%20AI%20model,investing%20in%20more%20efficient.

Brittany Luse, Alexis Williams, & Neena Pathak, How AI Impacts the Environment (and your Energy Bill), NPR: It’s Been a Minute (Sept. 29, 2025), https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5551155.

Derren Chan, UN calls for AI regulation amid expanding environmental footprint from daily use, JURISTnews (June 5, 2026), https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/06/un-calls-for-ai-regulation-amidst-expanding-environmental-footprint-by-daily-use/.

Env’t & Energy Study Inst., Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Energy and the Environment (Sept. 25, 2025), https://www.eesi.org/briefings/view/092525ai.

James O'Donnell & Casey Crownhart, We did the math on AI’s energy footprint: Here’s the story you haven’t heard, MIT Tech. Rev. (May 20, 2025), https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/. [MIT Tech Review allows a limited number of free articles per month without a subscription].

Jon Gorey, Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom, Lincoln Inst. Of Land Pol’y (Oct. 17, 2025), https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/land-lines-magazine/articles/land-water-impacts-data-centers/.

Kate Saenko & The Conversation US, A Computer Scientist Breaks Down Generative AI’s Hefty Carbon Footprint, Sci. Am. (May 25, 2023), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-computer-scientist-breaks-down-generative-ais-hefty-carbon-footprint/.

Marshall Shepherd, New Evidence Data Centers May Cause Hotter Weather, Forbes (May 19, 2026), https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2026/05/19/new-evidence-data-centers-cause-hotter-weather/.

Robert Scheier, 4 Paths to Sustainable AI, CIO (Jan. 31, 2024), https://www.cio.com/article/1301912/4-paths-to-sustainable-ai.html#:~:text=want%20to%20interrupt%20the,a%20straightforward%20path%20to.

Sandeep Ravindran, Cutting AI Down to Size, 387 Sci, at 6736 (Feb. 21, 2025), https://www.science.org/content/article/what-s-tinyml-global-south-s-alternative-power-hungry-pricey-ai.

Shaolei Ren, How Much Water Does AI Consume? The Public Deserves to Know, OECD.AI (Nov. 30, 2023), https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/how-much-water-does-ai-consume.

Sophia Chen, How much energy will AI really consume? The good, the bad and the unknown, Nature (Mar. 5, 2025), https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00616-z.

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, The Cloud is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage, MIT Schwarzman Coll. of Computing (Jan. 27, 2022), https://mit-serc.pubpub.org/pub/the-cloud-is-material/release/2.

Ramesh Srinivasan & Emily Jacobi, Opinion: AI is Destroying Our Planet. We Must Act to Check Its Growth – and Save Ourselves, UCLA Newsroom (Mar. 3, 2026), https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/opinion-ai-is-destroying-our-planet-we-must-act. 

Univ. of Va., Living with Data Centers: Co-Producing a Framework for Climate, Community, and Infrastructure Resilience in Loudoun County, Virginia, https://environment.virginia.edu/data-centers-Northern-Va (last visited June 11, 2026).

Presentations

Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), AI & Sustainability on Campus: Policy, Footprint, and Institutional Strategy (Apr. 14, 2026), https://gamma.app/docs/AI-Sustainability-on-Campus-Policy-Footprint-and-Institutional-St-qeqcjry1hhn9x5j?mode=doc.

TED, We’re Doing AI All Wrong, Here’s How to Get it Right - Sasha Luccioni (YouTube, Dec. 1, 2025), https://www.ted.com/talks/sasha_luccioni_we_re_doing_ai_all_wrong_here_s_how_to_get_it_right.

Yale L. Libr., Critical Legal AI Literacies: Anne Pasek on “Legal AI as Trash,” (YouTube, Dec. 12, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWTf_75YLZU.

Reports

Arman Shehabi et al., 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, Lawerence Berkeley National Laboratory (Dec. 19, 2024), https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energy-usage-report.

Ashley Lawson et al., Data Centers and Their Energy Consumption: Frequently Asked Questions, R48646, Cong. Rsch. Service, Libr. of Cong. (May 12, 2026), https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646.

Capgemini Research Institute, Developing Sustainable GenAI (2024), https://www.capgemini.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Final-Web-Version-Report-Sustainable-Gen-AI-2.pdf.

Anastasia Tsougka & Zuzanna Warso, From Innovation to Overshoot: How Data Centre Expansion Risks Derailing Climate Goals, Env’t Coalition on Standards (Sept. 2025), https://ecostandard.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Data-centres-report.pdf.

Cornelis P. Baldé et al., Global E-waste Monitor 2024, Int’l Telecommunication Union & United Nations Inst. for Training and Rsch. (Nov. 2, 2024), https://ewastemonitor.info/the-global-e-waste-monitor-2024/.

IEA, Energy and AI (2025), https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai.

IEA, Key Questions on Energy & AI (2026), https://www.iea.org/reports/key-questions-on-energy-and-ai.

Jens Gröger et al., Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence, Greenpeace (2025), https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20250514-greenpeace-studie-umweltauswirkungen-ki-eng.pdf.

Ketan Joshi, The AI Climate Hoax (Feb. 17, 2026), https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/02/17/big-tech-greenwashing-report/.

M. Aczell et al., Environmental Cost of AI's Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints, United Nations Univ. Inst. for Water, Env’t & Health (Jun. 3, 2026), https://unu.edu/inweh/collection/environmental-cost-of-AIs-Enrgy-Use-Carbon-water-and-land-footprints.

U.S. Government Accountability Office, Artificial Intelligence: Generative AI’s Environmental & Human Effects (April 2025), https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-107172.pdf.

Scholarly Articles, Conference Proceedings, & Working Papers  

Abdulaziz Tabbakh et al., (2024). Towards Sustainable AI: A Comprehensive Framework for Green AI, 5 Discover Sustainability, at 408 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-024-00641-4.

Adrien Berthelot et al., Understanding the Environmental Impact of Generative AI Services, 68 Communications of the ACM 7 (June 3, 2025), https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3725984.

Alesia Zhuk, Artificial Intelligence Impact on the Environment: Hidden Ecological Costs and Ethical-Legal Issues, 1 J. of Digit. Technologies & L. 4 (2023), https://www.lawjournal.digital/jour/article/view/303.

Alessandra Bonfiglioli et al., Data, Power and Emissions: The Environmental Cost of AI, CESifo Working Paper No. 12158 (2025), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5553342.

Alex de Vries-Gao, The Carbon and Water Footprints of Data Centers and What This Could Mean for Artificial Intelligence, 7 Patterns 1, at 101430 (Jan 9, 2026), https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899%2825%2900278-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2666389925002788%3Fshowall%3Dtrue.

Alexandra Sasha Luccioni & Alex Hernandez-Garcia, Counting Carbon: A Survey of Factors Influencing the Emissions of Machine Learning (Feb. 16, 2023), https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08476.

Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, Emma Strubell, & Kate Crawford, From Efficiency Gains to Rebound Effects: The Problem of Jevons’ Paradox in AI’s Polarized Environmental Debate, ACM Conf. on Fairness, Accountability, & Transparency (June 2025), https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16548.

Andrea Marinoni, et al., The Data Heat Island Effect: Quantifying the Impact of AI data centers in a warming world, (Mar. 2026), https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20897.

Andrew A. Chien et al., Reducing the Carbon Impact of Generative AI Inference (today and in 2035), Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Sustainable Comput. Sys., Aug. 2, 2023, at 1, https://doi.org/10.1145/3604930.3605705.

Andrien Berthelot et al., Understanding the Environmental Impact of Generative AI Services, 68 Commc’ns of the ACM 7, at 46 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1145/3725984.

Apoorva Chouksey et al., The Green Paradox: The Climate, Environmental, and Sustainability Implications of Artificial Intelligence, 6 Glob. Env’t Change Advances, at 100029 (Mar. 2026), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950138525000178.

Aras Bozkurt, AI’s Thirst, AI’s Heat, AI’s Waste: Exposing the Hidden Environmental Impact of Every Artificial Intelligence Interaction, 17 Open Praxis 4, at 638 (2025), https://openpraxis.org/articles/10.55982/openpraxis.17.4.1058.

Aras Bozkurt & Ramesh C. Sharma, G for Generative is a Gluttonous Fraud and Shit, G for Green is Genuine Intelligence: Exploring the Unspoken Environmental Cost and the Computational Opulence Paradox in the Artificial Intelligence Landscape, 20 Asian J. of Educ. 2 (2025), https://asianjde.com/ojs/index.php/AsianJDE/article/view/864.

C.A. Silva et al., A Review on the Decarbonization of High-Performance Computing Centers, 189 Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, at 114019 (2024), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032123008778.

Carole-Jean Wu et al., Sustainable AI: Environmental Implications, Challenges and Opportunities, Proceedings of the 5th MLSys Conf. (2022), https://proceedings.mlsys.org/paper_files/paper/2022/hash/462211f67c7d858f663355eff93b745e-Abstract.html.

Charlie Wilson et al., Digitalisation and AI Impacts on Energy Transitions and Climate Targets (Feb. 2026), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/402037312_Digitalisation_and_AI_impacts_on_energy_transitions_and_climate_targets.

Delong Nie, Xin Li, & Xiaoli Su, GenAI’s Silent Cost: The Looming Environmental Crisis, 22 Integrated Env’t Assessment & Mgmt. 1, at 316 (2026), https://academic.oup.com/ieam/article/22/1/316/8414199?guestAccessKey=.

Emma Strubell, Ananya Ganesh, & Andrew McCallum, Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP, Proceedings of the 57^th Ann. Meeting of the Ass’n for Computational Linguistics (2019), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243.

Esther O. Esho, Andronicus A. Akinyelu, & Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis, Sustainable Generative AI and Quantum Computing: Review Assessment on the Environmental Impact of Generative AI and Quantum Technologies, 7 Frontiers in Sustainability (Feb. 24, 2026), https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainability/articles/10.3389/frsus.2026.1726832/full.

Gimah Matthew, Energy-Efficient and Green AI, 7 Int’l J. of Humanities & Info. Tech. 3 (2025), https://ijhit.info/index.php/ijhit/article/view/171.

Hamish Beath et al., Artificial Intelligence Drives Divergent Emission Futures (Feb. 23, 2026), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401075366_Artificial_intelligence_drives_divergent_emission_futures.

Jerry Huang et al., White Paper on Global Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impact, 1 AI & Sustainability (October 2024), https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ruijie-Huang-3/publication/384687490_White_Paper_on_Global_Artificial_Intelligence_Environmental_Impact/links/685dae0be4632b045dc7ee7b/White-Paper-on-Global-Artificial-Intelligence-Environmental-Impact.pdf. 

Kai Ebert et al., The Global Landscape of Environmental AI Regulation: From the Cost of Reasoning to a Right to Green AI (2026), https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00068.

Lynn Kaack et al., Aligning Artificial Intelligence with Climate Change Mitigation, 12 Nature Climate Change 6 (June 2022), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361202518_Aligning_artificial_intelligence_with_climate_change_mitigation.

Marie Josefine Hintz et al., Practical Implementation of Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation in Cities – Priorities, Collaborations and Challenges, Energy Rsch. & Soc. Sci. 131 (2026), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398821237_Practical_implementation_of_artificial_intelligence_for_climate_change_mitigation_in_cities_-priorities_collaborations_and_challenges.

Maximilian Dauner & Gudrun Socher, Energy Costs of Communicating with AI, 10 Frontiers in Commc’n (Jun. 18, 2025), https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1572947.

Min-Kyu Kim, Tae-An Yoo & Ji-Bum Chung, Toward Sustainable Generative AI: A Scoping Review of Carbon Footprint and Environmental Impacts Across Training and Inference Stages, 14 IEEE Access, at 18881 (2026), https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17179.

Mochen Liao, Kai Lan, & Yuan Yao, Sustainability Implications of Artificial Intelligence in the Chemical Industry: A Conceptual Framework, 26 J. of Indus. Ecology 1 (2022), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13214.

Mohammad Hosseini, Peng Gao & Carolina Vivas-Valencia, A Social-Environmental Impact Perspective of Generative Artificial Intelligence, Env’t Sci. & Ecotechnology 23 (2025), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666498424001340.

Neil Franklin, Generative AI will Lead to a Threefold Increase in Greenhouse Gases from Data Centres, Insight (Sept. 9, 2024), https://workplaceinsight.net/generative-ai-will-lead-to-a-threefold-increase-in-greenhouse-gases-from-data-centres/.

Nicholas Stern et al., Green and Intelligent: The Role of AI in the Climate Transition, 4 Climate Action 56 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00252-3

Noman Bashir et al., The Climate and Sustainability Implications of Generative AI, An MIT Exploration of Generative AI From Novel Chemicals to Opera (Mar. 27, 2024), https://mit-genai.pubpub.org/pub/8ulgrckc/release/2.

Pengfei Li et al., Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models (Mar. 26, 2025), https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271.

Pengg Wang, Lingyu Zhang, & Eric Masanet, E-waste Challenges of Generative Artificial Intelligence, 4 Nature Computational Sci. 11, at 818 (2024), https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-024-00712-6.

Reid Lifset et al., Artificial Intelligence’s Environmental Impacts: Exploring Research on “Red AI,” (June 17, 2025), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5311903.

Ricardo Vinuesa et al., The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, 11 Nature Communications 233 (2020), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14108-y.

Rosalie Waelen & Aimee van Wynsberghe, Considering the Social and Economic Sustainability of AI, 31 Sci. & Eng’r Ethics 4 (2025), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-025-00544-1.

Samarth Sikand et al., Do Generative AI Tools Ensure Green Code? An Investigative Study, Proceedings of the 2nd Int’l Workshop on Responsible AI Eng’g (July 29, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1145/3643691.3648588.

Sasha Luccioni, Yacine Jernite, & Emma Strubell, Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?, ACM Conf. on Fairness, Accountability, & Transparency (2024), https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16863.

Sebastián Lehuedé, An Elemental Ethics for Artificial Intelligence: Water as Resistance Within AI’s Value Chain, AI & Soc’y: J. of Knowledge, Culture & Commc’n (Mar. 12, 2024), https://ssrn.com/abstract=4756794.

Shyam Agarwal & Mahasweta Chakraborti, The Hidden AI Race: Tracking Environmental Costs of Innovation (Nov. 27, 2025), https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22781.

Sophia Falk & Aimee van Wynsberghe, Challenging AI for Sustainability: What Ought It Mean? 4 A.I. & Ethics, at 1345 (2024), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-023-00323-3.

Sophia Falk, Aimee van Wynsberghe, & Lisa Biber-Freudenberger, The Attribution Problem of a Seemingly Intangible Industry, 16 Env’t Challenges, at 101003 (August 2024), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667010024001690?via%3Dihub.

Sophia Falk et al., From FLOPs to Footprints: The Resource Cost of Artificial Intelligence (Dec. 2025), https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04142.

Sophia Falk et al., From Computation to Environmental Cost the Resource Burden of Artificial Intelligence, 7 Communications Earth & Env’t 1, at 397 (May 7, 2026), https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-026-03537-5.

Syed Masiur Rahman, Asif Raihan, & Shadi Abudalfa, Generative Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Assessment: A New Paradigm for Sustainability Analysis, 76 Env’t Mgmt. 93 (2026), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00267-026-02402-7.

Thomas Le Goff, The Unsuitability of Existing Regulations to Reach Sustainable AI, Inst. for Applied Econ. Rsch. (Oct. 2025),  https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04958.

Tianqui Xiao et al., Environmental Impact and Net-Zero Pathways for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence Servers in the USA, 8 Nature Sustainability, at 154 (2025), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01681-y.

Verónica Bolón-Canedo et al., A Review of Green Artificial Intelligence: Towards a More Sustainable Future, 559 Neurocomputing, at 128096 (Sept. 28, 2024), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925231224008671?via%3Dihub.

Wacuka M. Ngata et al., The Cloud Next Door: Investigating the Environmental and Socioeconomic Strain of Datacenters on Local Communities, COMPASS '25: ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conf. on Computing & Sustainable Societies (July 21, 2025), https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715335.3736324.

Zhaohao Ding et al, Tracing the Carbon Footprint of Global Generative Artificial Intelligence, 6 The Innovation 5 (May 2025), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666675825000694