Seminar with Dr Yoriko Otomo

Screening for Sustainability Seminars: “AI and Implications for Environmental Governance”

Dr Yoriko Otomo

AI’s environmental harms are not incidental side effects but expressions of a deeply unequal global political economy. Recent projections suggest that data centres’ electricity demand will more than double from about 415 TWh in 2024 to roughly 945 TWh by 2030, largely driven by AI workloads, a consumption level comparable to Japan’s annual electricity use. Estimates also indicate that AI already accounts for 5–15% of data centre power and could rise to 35–50% by 2030. At the same time, the water footprint of frontier models is staggering: training a single GPT 3 scale system has been estimated at millions of litres of water, while AI related water use as a whole may already be in the hundreds of billions of litres annually. Yet the heaviest ecological and human costs—mineral extraction, toxic e waste, and water intensive mining—are concentrated in Indigenous territories and communities that do not share in AI’s economic gains or epistemic framing.

This paper argues that international law is captured by an AI discourse that privileges innovation, security and trade, relegating these material harms to peripheral environmental and human rights regimes that lack effective enforcement. Drawing on postcolonial and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), it treats AI as a continuation of extractive, supply chain capitalism: critical minerals, energy and data flow north; emissions, pollution and dispossession remain south. The paper calls for re grounding AI governance in binding lifecycle obligations, supply chain accountability, and institutionalised public interest leadership in standard setting and treaty processes, as well as a reevaluation of the ontological and cultural norms driving both model training and deployment.

Bio 
Dr Yoriko Otomo is a Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck Law School and an Expert-in-Residence at the Alan Turing Institute. With more than twenty years of academic, policy, and governance experience, her research spans international animal and environmental law, critical legal theory, and the governance of emerging technologies. Her scholarship has examined how legal and political institutions manage uncertainty, cross-border risk, and questions of legitimacy under conditions of technological and geopolitical change. She holds a PhD in Public International Law from the University of Melbourne and is the author of Unconditional Life: The Postwar International Law Settlement, (OUP 2016). Her wider body of work includes publications in international legal theory, environmental law, and animal law, including recent work on personhood, animism, and the person-thing distinction. This combination of doctrinal, theoretical, and policy-oriented research informs her current work on AI governance, systemic risk, and the legal treatment of increasingly agentic systems.

Contact:
If you want to attend online please contact sustainability [at] jur [dot] lu [dot] se

Partners:
This seminar is made possible thanks to the support of Formas, the Marcus and Marianne Wallenberg Foundation, and the Centre for European Studies (CFE) at Lund University