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Summary:
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This Supplement provides guidelines to policymakers, technologists, innovators, environmentalists, and other stakeholders from the technology industry, environmental sciences, and policy arena, on the topic of eco-friendly criteria to assess the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. With collective intellectual efforts from FG-AI4EE experts based all around the world, these guidelines aim to serve as common factors, rather than a comprehensive list, for the above-mentioned stakeholders to consider while developing, deploying, and promoting any piece of technology into the market and society.
While “emerging technologies” is a broad term, this report identifies a few sample technologies through their accordant applications and areas of work in 16 applicable industry domains, which we hope our stakeholders can use as references to improve the environmental efficiency of their own technological products and/or services. When discussing environmental efficiency, this report approaches eco-friendly criteria from an adjusted model of Life Cycle Assessment of Product, with which three stages of environmental impacts – Materials, Use, and End of life – are examined. The core of this report – “Guidelines and Recommendations” – provides both long-term and short-term strategies, which include not only specific examples for certain technologies addressing the three stages of environmental efficiency, but also an instrument to be used to localize such guidelines as well as to allow global benchmarking.
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