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.

Check out the new arrivals directly below, or click to jump to a specific category.

• How to measure AI emissions and environmental impacts
• How to limit AI emissions and environmental impacts

This list will be updated regularly. If you’d like to suggest an item for inclusion, email editor@trellis.net.

New arrivals

Assess water risks from AI energy decisions (Added Aug. 26, 2026)
On-site water withdrawals for cooling systems represent only a fraction of what they guzzle: 3 to 4 trillion gallons annually are used in thermal and hydropower generation in the seven states that host more than 50 percent of U.S. data centers, reports nonprofit Ceres in a new analysis. Indirect consumption is predicted to account for more than 79 percent of data center water use by 2030.

Opt for ‘lighter’ AI models (Aug. 26, 2026)
French consulting firm BetterTech has created the Frugal AI Switchboard, which lists open-source model alternatives to the frontier models from big companies such as Anthropic or OpenAI, along with details such as associated energy consumption and carbon emissions. Categories covered included chatbots and tools for coding, writing, data analysis, image generation and meetings. 

Get a real-time view of AI-related emissions (Aug. 26, 2026)
Carbonlog from carbon credits platform company Cnaught, which plugs into Anthropic’s Claude AI model, estimates the carbon dioxide emissions generated during coding sessions. It was launched to help sustainability professionals demonstrate the impact of AI on power consumption and emissions to other teams in their companies. 

How to measure

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.

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. 

Check out this tool for comparing AI vendor emissions (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. 

Watch this open AI standards group (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

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.  

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.