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Database entryUsesLevel 4 of 6 occupation or activityOccupation or activity, level 4 of 6Used to calculate 8 entries, levels 5 and 6Calculated with 12 entries, levels 1 and 3Database structure

Teacher, 1 year

A year of work for a secondary school teacher who uses AI: about 53 lessons prepared, 170 quick questions, 4.4 presentations of 10 slides, and 8 other tasks. Projet Celsius estimate.

  • Text and conversation account for 98% of emissions: "Prepare a lesson" weighs as much as 21 quick questions.
  • About 430 requests to AI over the year, or 2 per working day.
  • 2.3 times lower than the AI footprint of an office employee, for the same use.
  • An estimate: the frequencies and the share done with AI are our assumptions.
Calculated with
Used to calculate

Breakdown of emissions by item

260 gCO2e in total: 570 Wh of electricity × 458 gCO2e/kWh (servers worldwide).

Inputs of the calculation 9

PUE of the data centre, Read 1,000 tokens, Re-read from cache, Write, with reasoning, Write 1,000 tokens, Generate an image, Prepare a lesson, Quick question, Presentation of 10 slides

How the calculation is built

A year of work for a secondary school teacher who uses AI, task by task: lessons prepared, exercise sheets, marked papers, comments on pupils' work, emails. The frequencies come from teachers' working time (DEPP, 2025) and O*NET, AI use from the Gallup survey (2025); these are assumptions, and they can be adjusted.

Comparison with other occupations and activities

See the full list

Characteristics

Unit1 person, 1 year : 220 days
Default locationworld, 458 gCO2e/kWh (Ember 2025, life cycle); 11 other locations to choose from
Countedthe tasks done with AI over a working year, including data centre cooling
Not countedserver manufacturing, model training, the person's device and the tasks done without AI
Statusestimated
All the characteristics identifier, version, rule for the value, sources, licence
IdentifierIA-0316, projetcelsius.com/en/ai/database/IA-0316/
Version0.1 of 2 November 2026
CategoryOccupations and activities, one person, one year
Choice of the selected valuedatabase calculation from the entries this one is made of, at the quantities of the unit
Sourcescalculation of the database
LicenceCC BY 4.0
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