Quantifying and Disclosing the Environmental Footprint of AI in Research: Life Cycle-Informed Framework and Open-Access Calculator Development Study.

BACKGROUND

AI research increasingly depends on energy-intensive computation, yet energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, hardware life cycle burdens, and water consumption are rarely reported in a standardized way. This lack of reproducible environmental accounting limits comparisons across studies and obscures the trade-offs among model performance, infrastructure choices, carbon intensity, and cooling water demand.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to develop and describe an open-access, life cycle-informed AI Environmental Footprint Calculator and propose a minimum reporting dataset for transparent environmental disclosure in AI research.

METHODS

We developed a browser-based calculator that combines operational energy, regional grid carbon intensity, power usage effectiveness (PUE), water usage effectiveness, hardware embodied emissions, and workload-specific metrics for training and inference. The framework was evaluated in 3 representative scenarios: a single-graphics processing unit laboratory fine-tuning task, a midsized academic cluster workload, and a large-scale industrial training cycle. Outputs were compared with those of established tools to identify how boundary choices and parameter assumptions affect emission estimates.

RESULTS

Across the scenarios, the inclusion of PUE and hardware life cycle allocation increased reported emissions compared with operational-only estimates. In the small laboratory scenario, optimization reduced total emissions from approximately 0.07 kg carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) to 0.05 kg CO2e and improved the proposed label from C to B. In the midsized cluster scenario, carbon-aware scheduling reduced emissions from approximately 665 kg CO2e/month to 450 kg CO2e/month-a 32% reduction. In the large-scale scenario, shifting to renewable-backed, lower-PUE infrastructure reduced operational emissions by approximately 79% while increasing the importance of water-carbon trade-off reporting.

CONCLUSIONS

The calculator provides a practical and transparent method for reporting AI environmental footprints using auditable parameters and publication-ready outputs. Routine disclosure of energy use, emissions, water use, hardware assumptions, and regional context can improve reproducibility and support more equitable and sustainable AI research evaluation.