Article by Valerie Volcovici: “…Reuters interviewed 15 major environmental, conservation and development organizations about their AI use. All said they used the technology in some form and expressed concern about the environmental impact of the data centers powering it. The centers, filled with servers, can require vast amounts of electricity, along with water for cooling.
It’s a global dilemma for individuals, governments and industries balancing AI’s benefits with its enormous risks. The tradeoffs likely will grab attention at the UN’s COP31 climate conference this month, when host Turkey will call on governments, businesses and other institutions to sign a pledge outlining principles to ensure AI is developed and deployed sustainably…
Many of the organizations that spoke to Reuters believe AI’s benefits currently outweigh its costs because the technology is enabling work that was previously difficult, expensive or impossible.
Kenya’s Save the Elephants, a partner of the Wildlife Conservation Network, said it is using machine learning to improve population surveys and study elephant communication.
Frank Pope, the group’s chief executive, said an aerial survey of Kenya’s largest protected area in 2017 generated roughly 200,000 images that took nine people nine months to review manually. AI models trained on Nvidia’s GeForce graphics platforms can now complete similar analyses in hours.
“The results have been eye-opening,” Pope said. “We found that human surveys were missing about a third of the elephants, roughly half of zebras and giraffes, and three-quarters of oryx populations.”
More accurate wildlife data can help secure financing for conservation, he said.
“Ultimately, these tools make nature measurable and therefore investable,” he said. “That’s a critical transformation, if we’re going to conserve biodiversity at scale.”
At the institute founded by the late conservation icon Jane Goodall, researchers are using AI to digitize decades of field notes about chimpanzee behavior in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park.
The project was once expected to take 13-15 years because the records were written by hand using the local Kiha language and scientific shorthand.
Thanks to a tool developed with Amazon Web Services, the notes can now be scanned, translated and structured in minutes, slashing the time needed to about two years, said Lilian Pintea, the Jane Goodall Institute’s vice president of conservation science.
During her lifetime, Pintea said, Goodall supported the use of AI to advance conservation science, provided people remained firmly in control of how it was used.
“AI technology should be seen as tools which are human-centered,” Pintea said…(More)”.
