Expert Assessment: The Systemic Environmental Risks of Artficial Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper explores the complex, systemic environmental risks of AI beyond direct resource use, emphasizing how AI's integration into societal systems can cause nonlinear, potentially irreversible ecological and social harms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel three-level framework for analyzing systemic environmental risks of AI, based on literature review and expert case studies.

Findings

AI's systemic risks extend to climate, biodiversity, and socioecological systems.

The framework identifies structural conditions, risk amplification, and observable impacts.

Case studies demonstrate the framework's application in agriculture, biodiversity, and waste management.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often presented as a key tool for addressing societal challenges, such as climate change. At the same time, AI's environmental footprint is expanding increasingly. This report describes the systemic environmental risks of artificial intelligence, in particular, moving beyond direct impacts such as energy and water usage. Systemic environmental risks of AI are emergent, cross-sector harms to climate, biodiversity, freshwater, and broader socioecological systems that arise primarily from AI's integration into social, economic, and physical infrastructures, rather than its direct resource use, and that propagate through feedbacks, yielding nonlinear, inequitable, and potentially irreversible impacts. While these risks are emergent and quantification is uncertain, this report aims to provide an overview of systemic environmental risks. Drawing on a narrative literature review, we propose a three-level framework that operationalizes systemic risk analysis. The framework identifies the structural conditions that shape AI development, the risk amplification mechanisms that propagate environmental harm, and the impacts that manifest as observable ecological and social consequences. We illustrate the framework in expert-interview-based case studies across agriculture and biodiversity, oil and gas, and waste management.