Artificial Intelligence Risks and Sustainability

This research paper examines the deployment of AI in farming, forestry, and marine resource extraction, highlighting a gap in systemic risk research and identifying four primary risks: algorithmic bias, unequal access, cascading failures, and efficiency-resilience trade-offs.

• The research provides a global overview of AI and related technologies in sectors with high sustainability impact potential, specifically farming, forestry, and the extraction of marine resources, while examining the limitations of current governance mechanisms to address associated risks.
• AI-driven automated decision-making and predictive analytics, paired with robotics and sensor technology, are expected to alter how governments, private actors, communities, and individuals respond to and perceive ecological and climate change.
• Despite increasing investments and deployment of AI in environmental monitoring and sustainability-critical domains, there is a lack of in-depth research on systemic risks. The authors identify four specific systemic risks: trade-offs between resilience and efficiency, cascading failures and external disruptions, unequal benefits and access, and allocative harms and algorithmic bias.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2021). Artificial Intelligence Risks and Sustainability. https://www.sei.org/publications/artificial-intelligence-risks-sustainability/

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Artificial Intelligence Risks and Sustainability. 2021. https://www.sei.org/publications/artificial-intelligence-risks-sustainability/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Artificial Intelligence Risks and Sustainability |date=17 September 2021 |url=https://www.sei.org/publications/artificial-intelligence-risks-sustainability/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2021artificial, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Artificial Intelligence Risks and Sustainability}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2021}, month = sep, url = {https://www.sei.org/publications/artificial-intelligence-risks-sustainability/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }