AI is developing rapidly, as are concerns about the impact of its training and deployment on the environment. Recent studies suggest that since 2019, data centers have produced more CO2-emissions than the aviation industry (Shift Project, 2019), and they are extremely water-demanding (Li et al., 2023a). Given the urgency to achieve AI growth sustainably, the environmental impact of AI itself can no longer be overlooked. While studies about the environmental impact of AI have begun to emerge in the past few years, this emergent knowledge brings about new ethical questions and dilemmas. For example, what falls under the scope of the environmental impact of AI? Are there any ethical reflections accompanying their reporting? If so, which ethical theories guide the normative considerations about the environmental impact of AI? In sum, there are epistemic uncertainties about the environmental impact of AI systems and normative uncertainties about what the environmental impact implies for responsible innovation and governance of AI. In this study, we conduct a systematic literature review on (1) the findings about the environmental impact of AI systems, (2) whether normative conclusions are drawn based on this knowledge, and (3) if so, how these normative conclusions are justified. Our preliminary findings indicate that so far, the way in which ethical reflection accompanies considerations on the environmental impact of AI relies on traditional guidelines-based (e.g. Floridi et al., 2018) or justice-based (Li et al., 2023b) ethical approaches, prevalent in the domain of responsible design and governance of AI. Considering the extent and urgency of the environmental degradation that AI is not only helping to solve but also actively contributes to, a question arises on the need to expand the traditional first-line of ethical response with more speculative ethical starting points, for instance, grounded in the ethics of relations and more-than-human ethics. The findings in this study highlight gaps in the literature and formulate a novel research agenda on how ethics can help in dealing with the environmental impact of AI.