Environmental organizations are using artificial intelligence to analyze climate data, track wildfires and count endangered wildlife, even as many warn that the data centers powering AI add to electricity demand, water use and greenhouse-gas emissions.

In a report published November 7, Reuters said it interviewed 15 major environmental, conservation and development groups. All said they use AI in some form and expressed concern about the environmental impact of the infrastructure behind it.

Conservation International has started using AI to assess wildfire hotspots detected by satellites and send real-time alerts to community forest patrols in remote parts of Cambodia. The organization has described its Cambodia fire-alert system as sending GPS coordinates to local teams within minutes of a satellite detecting a fire. Save the Elephants said AI models can now review aerial survey images in hours, replacing a manual process that took nine people nine months to examine roughly 200,000 images. The group said human surveys had missed about a third of the elephants, roughly half of the zebras and giraffes, and three-quarters of the oryx populations.

Researchers at the Jane Goodall Institute are also using AI to digitize decades of handwritten observations about chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. The project was once expected to take 13 to 15 years, but a tool developed with Amazon Web Services can now scan, translate and structure the notes in minutes, reducing the estimated work to about two years, according to the institute’s vice president of conservation science. The institute says it is developing AI models to analyze millions of handwritten notes and video from more than 65 years of chimpanzee research, while AWS confirmed a $1 million commitment to digitize the archive using its AI services.

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Some organizations are trying to limit the environmental cost of their AI use. The World Resources Institute said it restricts resource-intensive applications such as video and image generation and stores previous AI query results so identical requests do not need to be processed again. The Nature Conservancy has installed AI-powered cameras on fishing vessels to analyze video onboard rather than sending large files to centralized data centers. Greenpeace International also uses some AI tools, but says it remains concerned about the scale of data center expansion.

The International Energy Agency’s 2026 analysis of energy and AI found that electricity consumption by data centers rose 17% in 2025, while AI-focused facilities recorded a 50% increase. The agency expects total data center electricity use to roughly double from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 terawatt-hours in 2030, with consumption from AI-focused data centers projected to triple. The IEA also says energy use per AI task has fallen sharply, although more energy-intensive applications such as video generation, reasoning and agentic tasks are becoming more common. OpenAI has separately pledged to pay for its own data-center energy and reduce water use, while estimates of ChatGPT’s water footprint vary depending on how direct and indirect consumption is counted; the company’s commitments are covered in Abijita’s report on its data-center energy and water plans.


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