Exploring the Viability of the Updated World3 Model for Examining the Impact of Computing on Planetary Boundaries
Nara Guliyeva, Eshta Bhardwaj, Christoph Becker
TL;DR
The paper revisits the Limits to Growth World3-03 model to examine whether it can quantify the environmental impact of computing, focusing on AI-driven data-center growth. It implements a proof-of-concept by embedding AI-related pollution variables into the persistent pollution sector and compares an AI-augmented scenario to the standard BAU run. Results show that AI scaling elevates persistent pollution and the human ecological footprint, indicating the model’s viability for exploring AI–environment interactions at a macro scale. The work lays groundwork for broader, data-driven analyses and suggests multiple avenues for extending the model to richer AI-related dynamics and planetary boundary considerations.
Abstract
The influential Limits to Growth report introduced a system dynamics-based model to demonstrate global dynamics of the world's population, industry, natural resources, agriculture, and pollution between 1900-2100. In current times, the rapidly expanding trajectory of data center development, much of it linked to AI, uses increasing amounts of natural resources. The extraordinary amount of resources claimed warrants the question of how computing trajectories contribute to exceeding planetary boundaries. Based on the general robustness of the World3-03 model and its influence in serving as a foundation for current climate frameworks, we explore whether the model is a viable method to quantitatively simulate the impact of data centers on limits to growth. Our paper explores whether the World3-03 model is a feasible method for reflecting on these dynamics by adding new variables to the model in order to simulate a new AI-augmented scenario. We find that through our addition of AI-related variables (such as increasing data center development) impacting pollution in the World3-03 model, we can observe the expected changes to dynamics, demonstrating the viability of the World3-03 model for examining AI's impact on planetary boundaries. We detail future research opportunities for using the World3-03 model to explore the relationships between increasing resource-intensive computing and the resulting impacts to the environment in a quantitative way given its feasibility.