There is no doubt that the digital sphere provides great opportunities for solving some of the world’s most difficult ecological problems. For example, the ability of artificial intelligence to analyze large datasets and provide answers almost instantly has garnered hope in the war against biodiversity loss. While the opportunities are indeed encouraging, there is an equally growing concern among experts that technological advancement is not an option. Ethics, empathy, and equitable distribution along with human stewardship must remain central to these developments.
The Promise of Intelligent Conservation: AI’s Potential
The landscape of conservation can be the potential of applied artificial intelligence, with numerous novel solutions already being executed. One of the futuristic approaches extends to AI phone apps, which, researchers claim, will be able to identify species in real time over time. An unprecedented understanding of the distribution of species and dynamics within the ecosystem would be attained.
Another idea that captures the imagination is the interpretation of cable signals disrupted by unique sounds produced by elusive flowers like whales and seals to track and map these nautical animals. The existing network of fiber optics in the oceans is used as a novel approach in which passive tracking becomes possible. These examples serve as indicators of the new understandings and improvements AI can access in conservation.
A Shadow of Concern: The Environmental Cost of AI
The advantages of AI in conservation do not come without their caveats. Concerns have been raised by specialists about the advantages of AI ever made being overshadowed by the costs and issues stemming from supercomputers, which are stipulated to constantly drain energy, hardware of the highest order, and constant electricity.
All these products converge on one sentence: casing problems in biased cataloging. Electricity is needed for all this to function, raising issues over AI’s potential to end real-time divisions. Conservation efforts are achieved to be focused in the northern globe, leading to inequitable access concerns for the global south. Biases in capture and execution explicitly outlined more easily accessible areas in forage data vs. captured data, biased composition of non-adjustable areas.
“We must avoid a scenario where power becomes centralized in conservation. The poorer Global South countries, which hold many of the world’s important ecosystems, are the most likely to be impacted by conservation but least likely to have AI infrastructure,” says Reynolds, one of the conservation scientists and AI specialists involved in the “Horizon Scan” initiative. This creates technology equity concerns, which should be examined alongside resource equity disparities on the accessibility and equity of power-determined AI conservation frameworks.
Beyond Conservation: The Broader Role of AI in Nature
It is possible that the most significant contribution of AI to the environment may stem from outside conservation. One study mentions the possibility of using AI in farming, which currently has the highest negative impact on biodiversity, to transform agriculture.
Precision farming practices made possible through AI could enable increased food production with less land and resources, adding further impetus to the already declining ecosystem biodiversity. However, other advancements in AI, like those that improve medicine and increase the average lifespan, could ironically raise the environmental burden of the population, especially in wealthy countries. Sandbrook notes, “The price of longer lives could be greater biodiversity loss.”
