Indirect Material Harms
AI proliferation causes harm to the environment through energy use and e-waste thereby destroying animal habitat
ENTITY
2 - AI
INTENT
2 - Unintentional
TIMING
2 - Post-deployment
Risk ID
mit677
Domain lineage
6. Socioeconomic and Environmental
6.6 > Environmental harm
Mitigation strategy
1. Implement a Green Compute Mandate requiring the exclusive use of certified renewable energy sources for AI infrastructure operations and the deployment of carbon-aware scheduling protocols to align high-intensity compute tasks with periods of low grid carbon intensity. 2. Mandate the adoption of algorithmic efficiency techniques, such as Knowledge Distillation and low-precision computation (e.g., FP16/INT8 quantization), to minimize the computational complexity and subsequent energy demand per AI inference and training epoch. 3. Establish and rigorously enforce Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) frameworks for AI-specific hardware and data center components, coupled with investment in AI-powered e-waste management systems for automated sorting and material characterization to maximize resource recovery.