Green Impacts of AI: What Leaders Need to Know and the Questions They Should be Asking
FE leaders are not short of priorities. Funding pressures, curriculum reform, skills gaps, and meeting diverse learner needs all demand attention, so the instinct can often be to treat sustainability more as one item on an already long and growing list. That’s especially true of the environmental footprint of AI, a more recent sustainability concern which even experts are struggling to get to grips with.
As with most conversations about AI in education, it can be challenging to move past the noise of opinions, hype, anxiety and the pressure to be seen to be taking action. The challenge is compounded by the fact that the underpinning technology itself is evolving faster than our collective understanding of what responsible use looks like. This makes it even harder for individuals, institutions, and the sector as a whole to understand the impact – let alone to act with any degree of confidence.
Jisc and EAUC’s new collaborative guide on AI and environmental sustainability in post-16 education attempts to minimise the confusion by establishing what we know and, more importantly, what we don’t yet fully understand. We’re all still learning what good practice looks like, and this guide reflects where we are now, not where we will ultimately end up. It won’t settle every question, but it will help us ask better ones and identify practical actions we can take now.
Some of the current lack of understanding comes down to the pace of change, and how generative AI has come to dominate so many areas of our lives, particularly within education. But that’s only part of the story. A bigger issue is the lack of data transparency and accountability from the tech sector itself. Many providers still won’t disclose basic figures on energy use, water consumption, or hardware lifecycles, let alone share them transparently for independent scrutiny. Without that data, institutions are often left estimating impacts rather than measuring them, which makes it hard for anyone in the sector – including us – to hold suppliers properly to account. This creates a knock-on effect in which uncertainty gets frustratingly compounded at every link of the supply chain.
Three places to start
Rather than waiting for perfect data, the guide focuses on what’s actionable now. And these can be distilled into three core themes:
- Digital activity and environmental sustainability are intrinsically linked.
- Environmental considerations should be included within the procurement process.
- We need to build a culture where everyone has a role in sustainability, not just a few enthusiasts or specialists.
Although we feel that these are good starting points to have in mind, we must also acknowledge that this isn’t a single, tidy problem with a set of single, tidy answers. It’s a complicated web of interconnected social and environmental issues, with unavoidable trade-offs and no shortage of nuance. So rather than pretend there’s a certainty we don’t have, we’d rather set out what we know so far and approach each of these three areas with curiosity.
Digital activity and environmental sustainability are intrinsically linked, yet they’re usually managed by different people with different priorities. Treating them as connected, rather than parallel, is the first step towards a coherent response.
Environmental considerations should be included within the procurement process. Suppliers respond to demand, and asking about things like energy use and hardware lifecycles as a matter of course sends a clear message to the market that this is of importance.
We need to build a culture where everyone has a role, not just a few enthusiasts. Policy and procurement set the direction, but everyday behaviour determines what actually happens, and behaviour only changes when people understand what they’re being asked to change and why. That means embedding AI’s environmental impacts into staff and students’ practical understanding of the technology from the outset, rather than being confined into policy documents.
Everyone’s job, no one’s project
One thing we’ve recognised through the work of the Green Mindset Collective last year is that environmental sustainability in the FE sector isn’t a standalone project that can be assigned, managed and closed off. It’s cultural. It needs a distributed response, not a hierarchical one, because no single team or role can carry it alone.
The most effective sector responses to big challenges tend to be whole-organisation ones, built through a combination of policy, procurement and everyday individual behaviour. We all have a part to play. A curriculum lead can shape how students encounter AI tools and what critical questions they’re taught to ask of them. An IT manager making procurement or configuration decisions can influence energy use in ways that may not even be flagged by senior leadership teams. A procurement officer asking one extra question of a supplier can shift a contract’s environmental terms and push for positive change.
Taken together, these small decisions can drive a cultural shift in the way an organisation tackles the environmental impact of its digital activities, and it is down to leaders to steer conversations and encourage individuals to make more sustainable choices.
The questions, not the answers
None of this rests on a single individual, institution or supplier getting everything right. But leaders are in a good position to start the conversation, and the guide sets out practical steps for procurement, policy and everyday practice alike. The starting point isn’t waiting for certainty. It’s about examining these three key areas, understanding what your institution is already doing, and deciding where leadership can turn overwhelm into awareness and action.
By Charlotte Bonner, Chief Executive of EAUC and Cal Innes, Sustainability Specialist at Jisc
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