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ECO-SUS-WATER-001

Name: Water-stress-blind AI inference placement

Category: Sustainability & Environmental Impact

Family: Water-Aware Computing

Primary layer: ai

System layers: ai

Description

AI inference workloads are placed without considering regional water stress or cooling impact.

Impact

  • type: water
  • confidence: 0.65
  • notes: Added as part of the 0.3.0 expansion to capture cross-system sustainability and operational waste.

Detection

  • method: static-or-runtime
  • confidence: 0.55
  • runtime_validation_required: Yes

Remediation

  • guidance: Consider region, model size, caching, batching, and workload scheduling to reduce water-stress-weighted impact.
  • tradeoffs: May require architecture, product, or operations review rather than a local code change.

Cost Dimensions

  • compute: high
  • memory: medium
  • network: medium
  • storage: low
  • human_time: medium
  • carbon: high
  • water: high

Amplification

  • scales_with_users: Yes
  • scales_with_data_volume: No
  • scales_non_linearly: No

Temporal Behavior

  • startup_only: No
  • steady_state: Yes
  • burst_sensitive: Yes
  • time_degradation: No

Runtime Evidence

  • region inventory
  • AI usage metrics
  • water stress factors

Pattern examples

No pattern examples provided.

Remediation examples

No remediation examples provided.

Metadata

  • catalog_version: 0.4.0
  • status: draft
  • source: catalog expansion recommendations applied 2026-05-21