One Hundred Years of Innovation. Are We Using It Wisely?

Is the same technology being deployed to protect the planet is simultaneously threatening it?

Collective awe was felt across London's Royal Albert Hall on Friday evening.

Sir David Attenborough has turned 100. And watching the footage shared at his celebration, archive film from the 1970s of a joyful encounter with gorillas. Numerous stories of Sir David in his trademark pale blue short-sleeved shirt, curious and utterly at home. Progressing to the extraordinary thermal and high-definition imagery of Planet Earth and last year's Ocean, you could not help but feel it. This is a truly wonderful, remarkable, technicolour world. And this remarkable man has made sure we’ve been able to see it.

The Prince of Wales stood on that storied stage and told Sir David Attenborough and the world watching on the BBC and iPlayer, that "for decades, your voice has been a constant in our lives, guiding us through rainforests and oceans, over mountains and into the very fabric of life". The hall responded with the kind of applause that is less about noise and more about gratitude.

So here is the question his centenary prompts for those of us who work at the intersection of technology and human experience: in documentary filmmaking, in nature broadcasting especially, is AI actually needed? And if the honest answer is no, what does that tell us about where AI does and does not belong?

The technological evolution on display at the Royal Albert Hall celebration was extraordinary. Alongside the archive footage, the original camera equipment used to film those early expeditions was shown; bulky, manual, extraordinary in its limitations and set against the sleek, sophisticated tools in use today. The thermal imaging camera in particular told a story of its own. Filmmakers once had no choice but to wait, sometimes for days, for an animal to come to them. Now, thermal imaging finds them, locating creatures in total darkness, in dense vegetation, across vast and remote terrain, without the animal ever knowing it is being watched.

The result is footage of breathtaking intimacy: lizards outwitting snakes in split-second bursts of speed, lion families moving through grasslands with a tenderness that no scripted drama could replicate, the minute, extraordinary detail of creatures living their lives in full, glorious technicolour. Every frame a reminder of what is at stake.

There is a lesson in that distinction that the broader technology industry would do well to absorb. Authentic is better. Real nature, real people, real stories. We do not need AI to generate a rainforest, synthesise a narrator's voice, or simulate an ecosystem.

Sir David Attenborough is 100. We will not have his voice for much longer. And the world he has spent a lifetime showing us is disappearing faster than most of us dare to acknowledge. Rainforests are being eliminated at an alarming rate, felled for timber, cleared to feed the insatiable global demand for palm oil, and replaced by monoculture where extraordinary biodiversity once thrived. This is not a distant or abstract threat. It is human destruction, happening at an industrial scale, in real time.

And here is where the ethics of AI become not just a technology question but a universal one. The next steps, how AI is governed, what it is permitted to do, whose interests it serves, what environmental cost it is allowed to extract, will be determined by human decisions made in the next decade. Get those decisions right, and AI becomes one of the most powerful tools we have ever had for understanding, monitoring, and protecting the natural world. Get them wrong, and we will have built a technology that accelerates the destruction of the very planet it was supposedly helping us to understand.

The job of technology, and of AI specifically, is to help us see more clearly where protection is needed, how threats are moving, and what interventions will work. Not to manufacture a cheaper version of the natural world for content. Not to simulate the wonder that Attenborough has spent a century documenting. But to help us protect the real thing, while there is still time.

But protecting the natural world that Attenborough has spent a century celebrating, that is an entirely different question. And here, AI's role becomes not just useful but urgent.

I have led climate tech programmes that sit at this intersection directly; digital twins, highly detailed data-driven virtual replicas of environmental ecosystems that allow scientists and decision-makers to simulate future climate scenarios and test mitigation strategies with unprecedented accuracy. I have worked on a proof of concept demonstrating how AI can digitise years of historical environmental data, enabling trend mapping and data interrogation that would take human researchers decades to complete manually. And I have worked on programmes mapping how climate extremes will reshape international migration patterns, work that is only possible because AI can process the scale of data involved.

This is AI in service of the planet. Utility AI, not generative AI. Assistance, not substitution. The distinction that Hollywood is now drawing, and that I have written about in the context of creative industries, applies here with equal force.

The contradictions, of course, are uncomfortable. The same technology being deployed to protect the natural world is simultaneously threatening it. According to the International Energy Agency, AI data centres will account for just under three per cent of global electricity demand by 2030. They consume vast quantities of increasingly scarce water. They generate significant electronic waste and rely on minerals that are often mined with devastating environmental consequences. The promise and the peril are inseparable, and pretending otherwise is not a strategy.

UNEP's landmark report, Navigating New Horizons, sets out what responsible AI governance for the environment actually looks like. Countries should establish standardised procedures for measuring AI's environmental impact, right now the data is unreliable and inconsistent. Governments should require companies to disclose the direct environmental consequences of their AI products. Tech companies must make algorithms more efficient and prioritise water recycling and component reuse. Data centres should be powered by renewable energy. And AI policy should be woven into wider environmental regulation rather than treated as a separate domain.

These are not abstract recommendations. They are the governance framework that the climate tech sector, now widening well beyond renewables and electric vehicles into grid infrastructure, carbon removal, industrial decarbonisation, and adaptation technologies, needs to operate within if it promises to outpace its cost. Green start-ups producing core technologies that meet broader economic and industrial demand are finding new momentum, particularly as European governments accelerate investment in sovereign technology infrastructure. The opportunity is real. So is the responsibility.

There is, in the end, a thread that connects Sir David Attenborough's century of work to every conversation we are having right now about AI, technology, and the future. That thread is this: technology has always been most powerful when it serves human and planetary purpose rather than replacing it. All it required was authentic human wonder, in service of a story worth telling.

The strongest documentary ever made about our planet will be made by people who love it. The most important climate technology will be built by people who understand what is at stake. AI can help both, processing data at a scale no human team can match, modelling futures we cannot yet see, and mapping risks that would otherwise remain invisible.

But the story? The meaning? The reason any of it matters?

That has always been, and must remain, 100% human.

Happy 100th birthday, Sir David. Thank you for reminding us what we are trying to protect.