Artificial Intelligence in Environmental Protection: The Importance of Organizational Context from a Field Study in Wisconsin

TL;DR

This study examines how organizational goals influence the deployment and interpretation of AI tools in environmental protection, highlighting differences between government and NGO use cases through a field study in Wisconsin.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into organizational factors affecting AI deployment in environmental regulation, emphasizing the importance of context in AI effectiveness.

Findings

Both organizations achieved similar detection accuracy.

Organizations differed in perceived usefulness of AI.

AI may reveal gaps in existing environmental laws.

Abstract

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have generated widespread enthusiasm for the potential of AI to support our understanding and protection of the environment. As such tools move from basic research to more consequential settings, such as regulatory enforcement, the human context of how AI is utilized, interpreted, and deployed becomes increasingly critical. Yet little work has systematically examined the role of such organizational goals and incentives in deploying AI systems. We report results from a unique case study of a satellite imagery-based AI tool to detect dumping of agricultural waste, with concurrent field trials with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) and a non-governmental environmental interest group in which the tool was utilized for field investigations when dumping was presumptively illegal in February-March 2023. Our results are threefold: First, both organizations confirmed a similar level of ground-truth accuracy for the model's detections. Second, they differed, however, in their overall assessment of its usefulness, as WDNR was interested in clear violations of existing law, while the interest group sought to document environmental risk beyond the scope of existing regulation. Dumping by an unpermitted entity or just before February 1, for instance, were deemed irrelevant by WDNR. Third, while AI tools promise to prioritize allocation of environmental protection resources, they may expose important gaps of existing law.