Room V
Workshop

Navigating the intersect of AI, environment and energy for a sustainable future

In person
  • Date
    10 July 2025
    Timeframe
    09:00 - 17:30 CEST
    Duration
    8h 30 minutes
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    In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries, understanding its environmental impact and energy dynamics becomes paramount for steering towards a sustainable future. This multidisciplinary workshop aims to unravel the complex relationship between AI, environment and energy consumption, spotlight innovations driving AI environmental efficiency, explore AI’s environmental transformative potential in several sectors, and deliberate on the pivotal role of standards, policies and regulations. Through a blend of theoretical insights and practical applications, the sessions are meticulously designed to provide a holistic view of AI’s environmental and energy footprint, groundbreaking environmental and energy-efficient technologies, AI’s role in enhancing the environmentally sustainable transformation, and the necessary regulatory frameworks to ensure sustainable development. This session aligns with ITU’s Green Digital Action initiative, reinforcing ITU’s commitment to promoting digital innovation, standardization, and global collaboration to foster sustainable AI development while ensuring the ICT sector minimizes its environmental impact and maximizes its transformative potential.

  • Schedule

    This session will examine the current landscape and future scenarios of AI energy consumption and environmental impact, offering a comprehensive overview of how energy, water and material are utilized, greenhouse gas emissions are generated throughout the lifecycle of a typical AI system. Resource demands during various stages, including data collection, model training, inference, and deployment, will be analyzed. Predictions from multiple studies and reports will be explored to discuss the potential escalation of energy and water usage, greenhouse gas emissions driven by the exponential growth of AI applications and data centers. This session aims to provide a holistic understanding of AI's environmental footprint.

    AI has the potential to transform completely how we conduct research, education, and business. On one hand, the opportunities are endless, e.g., in climate, health, education, and practically all areas of human life. For example. which action may have the most significant impact on climate? Which subpopulations are most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate-related stressors (e.g., heat waves, wildfires, tropical cyclones)? However, data centers are energy-intensive facilities, with computational power and cooling being the most energy-hungry processes. Depending on the task, data center servers require substantial energy to perform their computations, and this computing process can generate significant heat. Therefore, extensive energy-hungry cooling systems are often needed to avoid overheating of the hardware of computers and maximize their performance, stability, and lifespan, especially in high-performance systems. There is an increasing concern that the explosion of AI and its electricity demand is slowing down the progress of relying less and less on fossil fuel combustion for electricity generation. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the work conducted in my lab, hoping to shed some light on the controversial role of AI in the fight against climate change.

    NVIDIA’s Head of Sustainability, Josh Parker, explores the growing complexity and capability of AI systems – highlighting the need to understand their environmental footprint and their potential to drive sustainable progress. From breakthroughs in energy-efficient architectures to real-world applications in environmental monitoring and resource optimization, we stand at a pivotal moment to shape AI’s trajectory with sustainability at its core. Drawing on recent efforts to quantify and reduce the carbon footprint of AI development, Josh Parker offers a forward-looking perspective on how transparency, innovation, and intentional design can unlock a more sustainable future for all.

    This session will explore cutting-edge research focused on energy and environmental saving solutions for AI, highlighting advancements in new chips, innovative AI model architectures & algorithms, and development in frugal AI. The latest developments in environmental-efficient hardware, such as specialized processors and AI chips, as well as software optimizations that enhance computational efficiency, will be discussed. The session will also address green energy solutions designed to meet the growing demands of the AI sector, including the integration of renewable energy sources and other low carbon sources and sustainable data center practices. These technological and environmental innovations will be examined to provide a comprehensive understanding of how the AI industry can achieve greater energy efficiency and sustainability.

    This session will explore the transformative potential of AI to reduce environmental impact in various sectors, focusing on both theoretical insights and practical applications. The ways in which AI technologies can optimize their operations will be discussed. The latest research and real-world implementations will be presented to provide a comprehensive overview of how AI can drive innovation and environmental sustainability in various sectors. This session aims to provide valuable knowledge on the advancements and opportunities AI presents for improving environmental impact across systems and promoting a more sustainable future.

    Rising concerns over IT's carbon footprint necessitate tools that gauge and mitigate these impacts. This session introduces CodeCarbon, an open-source tool that estimates computing's carbon emissions by measuring energy use across hardware components. Aimed at AI researchers and data scientists, CodeCarbon provides actionable insights into the environmental costs of computational projects, supporting efforts towards sustainability without requiring deep technical expertise. This talk from the main contributors of Code Carbon will cover the environmental impact of IT and of AI specifically, the possibilities to estimate it and a demo of CodeCarbon.

    Generative AI is rapidly emerging as a foundational enabling technology, set to drive the next wave of innovation across sectors. To date, much of the attention has focused on its extraordinary and exponentially advancing capabilities. This talk will shift the lens to the critical dimensions of AI’s future evolution—factors beyond performance that are essential to ensuring its sustainable and democratic future.

    AI plays a dual role as both a driver and a challenge for energy sustainability. The exponential growth of data and AI-driven energy consumption calls for sustainable AI development. To address these challenges, a three-tier strategy is foreseen: "Efficient Infrastructure" (optimizing data center efficiency through advanced networking and cooling), "Intelligent Empowerment" (optimizing algorithms through multimodal and other techniques), and "Efficient Implementation" (promoting industry-specific AI applications via collaborative ecosystems). The balance between AI innovation and environmental responsibility requires global collaboration, pragmatic adoption, and human-centric values to harness AI as a force for green progress.

    This session will explore the critical policy and regulatory aspects of the interplay between AI and the energy sector. Policies that support both the optimization of energy systems through AI and the management of AI's own energy consumption will be addressed. Key topics include standardization priorities, innovative data center design strategies, and necessary regulatory frameworks. The roles of various stakeholders and a call for action to promote sustainable practices will also be discussed. This session aims to provide support for managing the relationship between AI and energy, ensuring efficiency and sustainability. This session will also highlight the importance of the ICT sector in managing its greenhouse gas emissions, aligning with global sustainability efforts. 

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    • 48
      Days
      03
      Hours
      39
      Min
      38
      Sec