Integrating environmental sustainability into EU data law and governance: The case of health data

Abstract The explosion of data‐driven technologies and artificial intelligence (DDAI) has created significant environmental sustainability challenges. DDAI produce intense greenhouse gas emissions and e‐waste, and rely heavily on the extraction of minerals for technological components and on water use to cool down data centres. Although several attempts have been made to use DDAI to address the environmental problems of our time, the issue of the (un)sustainability of DDAI technologies themselves remains, from a legal perspective, relatively uncharted territory. Specifically, a theoretical legal attempt to solve the question of how to integrate into EU data law and governance, the environmental (un)sustainability dimension of DDAI technologies is non‐existent. Drawing on relational theories of data governance, this article argues that, to tackle the issue of data (un)sustainability, it is necessary to (re)interpret traditional EU data protection law and governance to account for the benefits and harms to groups, populations and to the environment arising from the use of DDAI.