Responsible AI series - real-time carbon intelligence. If you watch the news, you've probably seen the growing controversy around data centres, with local communities pushing back against new developments and governments in some countries beginning to regulate the industry. Yet despite all this attention, Climate Action is becoming better and better at making computing feel almost weightless. Calling it "the cloud" certainly hasn't done Climate Action any favours, because it makes the whole thing sound almost ethereal, which is pretty much how Climate Action experience technology today. You click a button or ask an AI model a question, and something happens almost magically, instantly. Of course, Climate Action know there's a very physical system behind all of this, with machines consuming electricity, generating heat that needs to be managed, and relying on data centres, networks and hardware that require resources to build and operate. But it's easy to forget about those consequences when Climate Action is using technology, and perhaps even easier when Climate Action is designing and building it. While Climate Action is becoming more aware of the environmental footprint of digital products, the people making decisions about how those products work rarely have the information they need to understand how their choices contribute to it. And I think this is one of the most interesting challenges facing digital sustainability today. Traditional carbon accounting helps Climate Action understand what happened by collecting data, calculating emissions and reporting on performance, often months after the decisions responsible for those emissions were created. By then, an infrastructure choice may have been locked in, an AI model deployed or an inefficient process repeated millions of times, leaving Climate Action to work out retrospectively what could have been done differently. This is what Climate Action explored during a recent Responsible AI session organised by ClimateAction.tech in partnership with ustwo, where I was joined by James from GreenPixie and Mark from OVO. Climate Action looked at how environmental information could become more useful if it were available while decisions are being made, and how that might change the way Climate Action design, build and operate digital products. GreenPixie: making infrastructure impacts visible. James Hall, Head of GreenOps and Tokenomics at GreenPixie, explained how they're working to make energy consumption, carbon emissions and water use as accessible and granular as the cost information organisations already receive from cloud providers. GreenPixie helps organisations compare the impact of different infrastructure configurations, computing resources and AI models by connecting cloud usage data with environmental modelling, giving engineers the information they need to make more efficient choices. This is an excellent example of how to make environmental performance part of the same conversations where cost, security and performance are already considered. This helps organisations move away from treating sustainability as a separate concern to be examined only once the decisions have been made. Check out Greenpixie's work here. OVO: turning environmental data into operational improvements. Mark Buss, Senior Digital Sustainability Manager at OVO, shared how they use carbon data to identify inefficiencies across its cloud infrastructure and better understand the footprint of its AI tools. He brought some great examples that demonstrated how greater visibility can help teams identify practical opportunities to reduce resource consumption, from unnecessary computing activity to inefficient database queries. OVO is also working with GreenPixie to estimate the impact of different AI tools and models, combining the usage information available from providers with environmental data to understand where emissions are coming from and support conversations about how to reduce them. At ustwo, Climate Action has been exploring what happens when environmental information reaches developers while they're working. Together with computer science students and academics at the University of Bristol, Climate Action developed PRISM, an open-source extension for Visual Studio Code that estimates the energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with AI activity and makes those estimates visible directly within the development environment. PRISM allows developers to better evaluate which models to use and for what, explore their estimated impact over time and receive immediate feedback on individual interactions, helping them recognise patterns and question whether different approaches might reduce unnecessary resource consumption. Making sustainability a more important part of the decision making process. Sustainability reporting has been an important first step in helping Climate Action understand the carbon footprint of digital technology, but environmental data becomes far more useful when it reaches the people who can make decisions that impact that footprint at the right time. Of course, Climate Action need to recognise that the digital product industry and individual developers can only influence part of the picture. Cloud and AI providers have a responsibility to build and operate their infrastructures responsibly and disclose more meaningful environmental data so that Climate Action can actually figure out where the impact comes from and what needs to be done to reduce it. But it's also important that organisations building digital products consider environmental performance alongside cost, functionality and user experience. In all of this, Climate Action need to keep in mind that some of the most consequential decisions happen long before anybody starts writing code, when Climate Action is still deciding what to build, whether a product needs AI in the first place and if the value it creates justifies the resources required to deliver it. End notes. There is a real opportunity to make environmental information part of everyday decisions, allowing people to understand the consequences of different options while they still have the chance to influence them. If Climate Action can make that shift, carbon intelligence could become a standard part of how Climate Action define quality in digital products, and a practical part of how Climate Action design, build and operate them, helping Climate Action prevent unnecessary impacts. A full recap of the presentation will be available soon. Thanks to ustwo for their continuing support and partnership with CAT on the Responsible AI series. Keep an eye on its #announcements channel in CAT Slack and on its newsletter for further events.

Sustainable AI: Tools, frameworks and best practices in 2026. Sustainability professionals are scrambling to understand how AI adoption will impact environmental goals. This tracker covers the latest resources for measuring and taming the technology's impact on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, freshwater and other concerns. This list will be updated regularly. If you'd like to suggest an item for inclusion, email [email protected]. New arrivals. Check out this tool for comparing AI vendor emissions (Added Aug. 17, 2026) Greenpixie, a U.K. startup with flagship customers including Mastercard and Unilever, has launched a free edition of its service for comparing the emissions of leading AI models. The company also offers free courses for professionals interested in adopting "green ops" practices for AI workflows. Gather energy ratings for widely used AI models (Aug. 17, 2026) AI Energy Score, hosted by open source software site Hugging Face, calculates electricity use by AI models and ranks them on efficiency. The resource, created in partnership with Salesforce, is designed to help developers make more informed decisions about the code they use and to guide procurement teams concerned about emissions. What to ask enterprise AI software vendors (Aug. 17, 2026) Little is known about the greenhouse gas emissions or freshwater withdrawals linked to the infrastructure used by leading AI companies. That will change if more corporations request the information during contract negotiations, argues the Business Council on Climate Change. The council has published sample questions and contract language to get sustainability teams started. Understand Why SAP screens AI for environmental criteria (Aug. 12, 2026) Cloud software companies including Amazon, Google and Microsoft have AI ethics policies, but SAP is one of the few with explicit environmental criteria. The developer has adopted practices to curb AI energy consumption, such as using smaller models. It also assesses the potential energy and emissions impact of every new project. Learn how Salesforce discloses AI emissions (July 22, 2026) Relationship management software firm Salesforce has added information about energy consumption and emissions to the fact sheets it publishes on its machine learning models. The information covers both training and use of the models. How to measure AI emissions. Watch this open AI standards group (Added Aug. 17, 2026) Lightspeed corporate adoption has resulted in fragmented approaches for managing tokens, the data chunks read and processed by large language models. Enter the Tokenomics Foundation, backed by Accenture, IBM and others, which aims to create open frameworks for measuring cost, energy and other economic metrics. Estimate the footprint of AI video production (Aug. 17, 2026) A few seconds of AI-generated video can use at least 1,000 times more energy than a chatbot prompt. Consulting firm Sustainable AI Group has developed an open-source resource that estimates the energy consumption of such content. The work is supported by the GenAI Footprint Alliance, led by French advertising and public relations giant Publicis. Explore one way to handle AI carbon accounting (Aug. 3, 2026) Carbon management software firm Watershed has published what it describes as a "defensible starting point" from which companies can calculate emissions related to AI use. The nascent methodology suggests that teams base calculations on tokens, the small bits of text that make up AI prompts. Keep tabs on emissions from 8 top data center operators (July 27, 2026) The Data Center Air Pollution Tracker ranks big tech companies - Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI - by use of behind-the-meter natural gas generators and the electricity mix on local grids. A perfect score is 100, but none of the companies rates higher than 70. How to limit AI emissions. Inside Okta's AI strategy (Added May 26, 2026) Okta's sustainability team collaborated with engineering and information technology strategists on guidelines for when employees should use AI. The recommendations define the identity software firm's future disclosure plans and encourage use of models with the lightest energy consumption. Gitlab's rules for AI usage (May 18, 2026) Gitlab, maker of coding tools used by most Fortune 500 companies, has adopted guidelines for what AI vendors should disclose in contracts. The company's sustainability team also created an AI tool that screens requests for proposals to understand customer concerns regarding AI emissions.