Artificial intelligence has become one of the pressing points in climate talks amid concerns about the growing carbon footprint, mainly stemming from data centers powering the technology.
The issue will be in the spotlight at the COP31 climate summit in Türkiye next month, with the hosts saying they will push for "climate-responsible AI."
Türkiye, which will host the climate summit in Antalya, launched a push on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month for an initiative to address AI's skyrocketing energy demand through a political pledge that countries would adopt to align their AI infrastructure build-out with global climate goals.
The new Antalya Pledge on Artificial Intelligence is being developed with the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union, and a draft was expected to be shared ahead of COP31, the incoming Turkish COP presidency said.
"We must openly discuss AI’s growing energy consumption and it is time for governments to start setting the terms. We expect companies to be transparent about their energy use and to power their operations with clean energy,” said COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum.
However, the technology comes with a dual effect.
While the discussion over the technology's environmental impact, along with fears that it could pose an existential threat to humanity, has dominated the debate lately, experts also say AI itself could be used as a tool to combat climate change.
AI is being deployed in a broad range of applications, from improving weather forecasts to monitoring industrial emissions and optimizing renewable energy.
Many of these applications are less energy-hungry than general-purpose language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, according to experts.
Data centers as a 'challenge'
"Data centers have come in as a challenge ... There are genuine concerns about what all of this could mean for the energy system, for the energy sector, for climate," Siddharth Singh, an AI expert at the International Energy Agency (IEA), told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
"At the same time, because (AI) is a tool, it's an opportunity. It really comes down to how it is deployed," Singh said.
Experts cited its potential positive uses in areas such as the electricity grid and weather forecasting.
AI is already being used to make electricity grids more efficient in complex energy systems, helping operators manage the variability of solar and wind power.
If deployed across the economy, from transport to industry and buildings, the technology could save 13.5 exajoules of energy by 2035, equivalent to Indonesia's annual energy demand, according to the IEA.
Emissions reductions can be made, for example, by using AI to schedule a washing machine to run when solar electricity is abundant, Singh said.
WattTime, an environmental tech nonprofit, helps companies time their electric vehicles, phones, or other devices to periods when the energy is coming from cleaner power sources.
"One of the things AI is very good at is forecasting," WattTime co-founder Gavin McCormick said.
Weather forecasting revolution
Meanwhile, AI is also found to be transforming weather forecasting by producing high-quality projections much faster, said Florian Pappenberger, director-general of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
"AI has really revolutionized weather forecasting in the sense that you can actually now predict weather much faster, with a really high skill and with a high performance," Pappenberger told AFP.
He said AI forecasting is still grounded in physics-based models, while allowing the ECMWF to achieve in two years what would traditionally have taken 10 years to accomplish.
It is also much cheaper than traditional methods, enabling the ECMWF to produce more forecasts.
The technology can also improve early warning systems.
Oil AI
But while AI could boost the efficiency and use of renewables, the technology has long been used by oil and gas companies to sift through geological data, identify underground reservoirs and streamline fossil fuel production.
"AI can also have a detrimental impact on climate change from that angle," said Maria Joao Sousa, executive director of Climate Change AI, a nonprofit promoting the use of AI for climate action.
"AI will never be a silver bullet," she said. "Technology itself will never be the solution alone."