The Relations between AI and environmental protection: contributions to the implementation of SDGs

The event will gather global Leaders and experts to explore the potential use of AI and its impacts to environment, the Governance gaps, how to help decision- makers build resilience and sustainable economies. The event will also address the possibilities to use AI to the implementation of SDGs.

This event aims to promote a critical and multidisciplinary reflection on the impacts of artificial intelligence, withspecial emphasis on its environmental harms. It is essential to recognize that such harms manifest in distinctways, encompassing all forms of pollution listed under the law.

There are physical and direct impacts of the infrastructure required for operation of artificial intelligence: highelectricity consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, intensive water usage, dependence on non-renewable sources, and growing generation of electronic waste. All these elements constitute the visible and measurable environmental cost of technology.

However, there is another dimension, less perceptible but equally concerning: the environmental impacts mediated by the codes and algorithms that govern digital platforms. Digital information is, today, the drivingforce of the contemporary economy, generating new products, markets, and opportunities to create meaningfulsocial value. Nonetheless, it also generates pollution – less visible but no less impactful – in a way similar to what fossil fuels represented in the traditional economy.

Information bubbles, information overload, and algorithmic distortion make up this new kind of pollution, whose symbolic and diffuse nature challenges legal and regulatory structures. It’s important to measure and see perspectives to the implementation of SDGs.