Artificial intelligence (AI) is creating some difficult questions for the environmental sector.
Its growing demand for energy, water and data centre infrastructure cannot be ignored. At the same time, AI is rapidly becoming part of how businesses research, analyse information, solve problems and make decisions.
For us at Harmony Environmental, the answer isn’t to sit firmly in either the ‘for’ or ‘against’ camp.
It is to stay curious, stay critical and keep asking better questions.
Much of the conversation around AI has focused on productivity: doing things faster, automating tasks and reducing the time needed to produce an output.
That isn’t the part we find most interesting.
Used properly, AI can broaden the information available to us and introduce connections or perspectives we may not immediately have considered.
As environmental consultants, our work already involves bringing together regulation, operational realities, environmental performance, data and decades of practical experience. AI can become another input into that process.
It might surface research, highlight a connection or suggest an avenue worth exploring. We can then interrogate it, return to the original sources, fact-check it and decide whether it is actually relevant to the client in front of us.
In that sense, AI isn’t replacing expertise. It can help experienced people think more broadly.
And importantly, the process of checking the information often leads to further learning in itself.
Human judgement still matters enormously. AI cannot understand the nuances of a particular organisation, site or situation in the way someone with years of industry experience can. It can provide pieces of the puzzle; but people still need to know how those pieces fit together.
This is where the conversation becomes more complicated.
AI infrastructure has an environmental footprint, and questions around energy consumption, water use, carbon emissions, land and supporting infrastructure are entirely legitimate.
We should be asking them.
But perhaps the question is not simply: “should we be using AI?” Because AI is already here and its use is growing rapidly around the world. The more useful discussion may be about “how and where that growth happens?”, “what standards do we expect?”, and “how responsibly is the supporting infrastructure planned and operated?”
As an environmental consultancy, that feels like an important distinction.
If new infrastructure is going to be developed, what environmental questions should be asked at the planning stage? How should water and energy use be assessed? What should good environmental management look like? How should performance be measured, audited and continually improved?
And, as the technology evolves, what efficiencies might become possible that we cannot yet fully anticipate?
There is a temptation with any major technological shift to make the debate binary: progress or protection.
Environmental management rarely works like that.
Industry exists. Infrastructure exists. New technology will continue to emerge. Our role is to understand the impacts, challenge poor practice and help organisations find better ways of operating.
In some ways, we have an advantage that previous generations experiencing major industrial change did not have: we already understand many of the environmental consequences of growth.
That knowledge gives us greater responsibility, not less.
So Harmony’s position on AI is deliberately open-minded.
We will use it where it helps us research, question and think more deeply. We will continue to apply human expertise, professional judgement and rigorous fact-checking. And we will remain interested in the environmental questions its growth creates.
Because perhaps the most important question isn’t whether AI is good or bad.
It is whether we can become intelligent enough, collectively, to use it responsibly.
