Kuirme Collective

In this multilingual edition, edited by Katrin Fritsch, Maya Richman, Fieke Jansen and Katherine Waters, you will find different perspectives that critique technocapitalism, and envision pathways for just transition to sustainable and equitable infrastructures. It consists of four sections, each with a number of essay’s, interviews, and reflections.

Countering false and misleading solutions to ecological crisis

Becky Kazansky and Nikita KekanaPaz PeñaJessica Botelho, Lori Regattieri, and Eliana Quiroz [EN] on empowering community-driven alliances against social-environmental and climate disinformation.

Towards a just and equitable transition

Heather Milton-LighteningENPTKuirme CollectiveMichael Brennan and Hanan Elmasu [EN] end with a reflection on navigating the interstices as funders.

Imagining sustainable and equitable infrastructures

Paola Mosso and Janna FrenzelJuliana GuerraJennifer KamauRemy Hellstern and Jen Liu [EN] argue that we need to learn from nature and create proactive response frameworks and technologies that are regenerative by design.

“Border walls will not stop the climate crisis; they just reinforce the injustice of carbon capitalism.” - Jennifer Kamau

Building bridges and ensuring tech serves equitable climate action

‘An open movement to support climate action’Luis CarrascoMaya Richman and Fieke JansenNathaly EspitiaOona CastroMolly Mathews [EN] on organizing behind the scenes.

Maya AdamsKira Simon-KennedyLa Bruja RISO for the cover design.

insights from the event here), that were supported by the Green Screen Coalition.

Background on the coalition

Initial research commissioned by the Ford Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Ariadne Network highlighted the different ways in which climate justice and digital rights intersect. Think of: water rights disputes between data centres and local residents, rampant greenwashing disinformation by fossil fuel companies on social media platforms, and the internet’s vast ecological impact as a few examples of the complex problems at the intersection of climate justice and technology. There is a nascent community of practitioners who are working towards sustainable and climate-supportive infrastructures, and investigating where the internet aligns with the climate and environmental justice movement—and where it works against them.

This report presents a summary of the discussions for each deep dive. Each section frames the issue’s context, provides an overview of the key discussion points, and presents the priority areas of the group, opportunities and next steps.

Next Steps Awards

To act as a catalyst for new ideas, conversations and networks that are emerging at the nexus the Green Screen Coalition financially supported seven projects following the event. Together the awards encompass community building efforts, a stipend to collaboratively work on next steps, support hosting local events and translation of resources to bring the conversation back to the participants’ own communities.

Open Environmental Data Project

During the October event, the Open Climate track made significant progress identifying places of momentum and collective interest. The Green Screen Coalition is supporting the Open Environmental Data Project to build on this momentum and organize a meeting that brings together leaders from the open and climate movements to work on common principles, strategies and commitments under the umbrella of creating a common agenda.

Fictions and Frictions

Several deep dives noted that the global debates are skewed to American and European knowledge and interests. The Kuirme collective project ‘Fictions and frictions’ will identify gaps and similarities between different narratives and agendas on digital rights and climate justice in Europe and Latin America. The Green Screen Coalition is supporting this collective to amplify the debate beyond narratives of green capitalism, and bring imaginaries and actions from rural and urban Abya Yala (Latin America) to European contexts as well. The question that guides this action: What are the Fictions and Frictions in the intersections between digital rights and climate justice?

Privacy Camp 23

Privacy CampEDRiVUB-LSTSPrivacy Salon vzwInstitute for European Studies at USL-BSolidarity not solutionism: Wayfinding just paths for digital infrastructure that serves the planetworkshop: The climate crisis is a key digital rights issue.

Standards and governance

Association for Progressive Communications (APC) to co-host a process to develop a Theory of Change for digital rights advocacy to integrate climate and environmental justice, focusing on the intersections of technical standards and the governance of the internet and related climate technologies.

Access to climate information for indigenous communities

Internet infrastructures and digital tools contribute to the climate crisis and environmental degradation, but these tools can also unlock valuable information to local communities. This project is aimed at equalizing access to climate change information and digital tools for rural Mayan communities. The Green Screen Coalition is supporting this project to help community members translate scientific research about climate change and its local impacts into different digitals infographics with a soft language in Spanish and Yucatecan Maya.

Building bridges in Latin America

To bring the Berlin conversations around open and climate back to Latin American communities, the Green Screen Coalition is supporting Datos, Acceso a la Información y Transparencia to host a regional event in Latin America that will build bridges between Wikimedia communities, digital rights & environmental organizations to promote access to climate & sustainability knowledge.

Technical-territorial coalition building

The climate emergency and the need for a fair energy and technological transition places Brazil and Pan-Amazonia at the center of the global dialogue. There is a need to bring together, connect, and shed light on projects, ideas, and tech frameworks from the Pan-Amazon and work towards a common demand for the Brazilian internet governance forum. The Green Screen Coalition is supporting Popular Audiovisual Center (CPA) to bring together the Digital rights and Socio-environmental Climate Justice: Technologies, internet and community practices, to create a hybrid space to exercise and collect feedback protocols of decentralized governance and open source knowledge in the bases of justice and sustainability practices.

Identifying opportunities for climate justice considerations in digital rights work at EU level

The dominant EU narrative of twinning the digital and the green transition is based in a market logic where new technology offers quick fixes to very complicated social and environmental problems. There are many legislative and policy initiatives on the ‘green transition’ at EU level that have a technology component. This research should support the further development of a position and strategy on how digital rights organizations can engage with the climate justice issues in Europe, in a way that complements and adds value to the broader civil society field. What we would like this consultancy to answer is what is the added value of the digital rights field and how can we respectfully intervene. The answer to this question lies both in the content, on what to engage, and the process, how to engage.

We hope these reports will shed light on this complex issue and point to possible paths for the way forward.

Why this research

The internet is to this day the world’s largest coal-powered machine despite prevalent narratives that digitisation implies sustainability. Its expanding infrastructures, data storage, computational processes, and business model are increasingly putting a strain on the planet in various ways, and estimates show it exponentially escalating into the future:

• Critical raw materials needed for our personal devices, cars, and physical infrastructure
• Considerable energy, water and land are needed to run data centres as companies encourage users to upload everything to the cloud
• Enabling and expanding other extractive industries, such as the fossil fuel industry, and reinforcing harmful systems, like surveillance capitalism
• Climate mis- and dis-information started offline but has escalated in scale and impact stalling climate action and endangering climate activists

We need a place to start, and a guide to show us how to responsibly fund at this intersection so we can create an internet infrastructure that centres people and planet over profit and capital. Despite this nexus between the internet and environment, we are only in the early stages of integrating philanthropic funding strategies across these intersections.

This set of eight reports, supported by Ford Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Ariadne, is just the beginning of a long-term process to understand the implications and intersections of climate justice for digital rights and take action to address the climate crisis from this generation and all that come after.

Key takeaways from this research

• second issue brief, both the climate crisis and digital rights are global in scope; linked to exercising key rights; require coordinated action of market, state and citizens; and live within cross-cutting policy areas.
• If climate and environment is a lens that we can apply to any human rights issue, where should we begin in relationship to technology? Below are seven notable issues and framings from the research:
  • The environmental toll of digital infrastructures
    • The Engine Room (TER) notes we should “scrutinise corporate sustainability pledges by technology companies, which might only be a drop in the bucket compared to the full range of harms caused.”
  • Access to information and climate disinformation
    • Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) found that “the collective ability of governments, companies, and communities to achieve the Paris Agreement will be enabled by an information environment that supports the wide dissemination of high-quality climate science”. The most prominent producers of climate mis- and dis-information are fossil fuel companies via ad campaigns on platforms like Meta and Twitter.
    • Beyond influencing individuals on social media, politicians are heavily influenced by climate dis-information they find on social media platforms. Given their powerful position to influence policy and shape the narrative, their misinformed climate understanding can have an outsized effect on the climate conversation and action from governments.
  • Increased surveillance of environmental activists and land defenders
    • TER highlights the “new laws banning protest and intensified surveillance against climate movements around the world “significantly limiting the ability of climate justice communities and movements to protest and push back against those perpetrating harm. Much of the targeting of activists has taken place via digital platforms where they’re first identified, subjected to trolling, in some instances doxxed, and in cases involving powerful opposition, killed.” The digital rights community is already active in the security and privacy field, but more work is still needed to protect the people at the frontline of the movement.
  • Advocacy and campaigning
    • Well-designed and targeted advocacy campaigns still have the power to push back against harmful systems and extractive business models of Big Tech, mining, and fossil fuel companies, among others. APC shows how Global South digital rights activists have been focusing on the harmful consequences of extractive mining, and their environmental and human rights implications.
  • Governance
    • APC explores what the internet governance sphere can learn from governance debates on environmental issues. What allowed me to ground their argument was the example of applying environmental law to regulate the environmental harms of the internet infrastructure. They ask if it would be possible, using the Aarhus Convention, to demand more information on the massive natural resource-dependency of data centres, the environmental cost of using and manipulating data, and the projections of greenhouse gas emissions from our use of technology.
  • Open practices and climate monitoring
    • Open Environmental Data Project documented the ways citizen science and open practices provide tools to adapt, mitigate and empower communities to take their future into their own hands, when the government and private sector prioritise profit.
  • Migration justice
    • Another complex challenge shown in the research sits at the intersection of migration justice, climate migration and surveillance capitalism. Climate change is a root cause for displacement and migration across borders over the last decade. Many governments experiencing an influx of climate refugees have been reinforcing and expanding their border security in response, further investing in militarisation of border police and surveillance technology. Pushing back against surveillance capitalism helps everyone.
  • Political opportunity – Twin transition
    • We are at a tipping point for action for the climate and the future of the planet. At this moment, we are also witnessing a movement towards digitisation within the EU and beyond. This twin transition is an opportunity to make decisions that lead us towards the sustainable internet we need.

Recommendation to funders

• To work towards climate-supportive infrastructures we need digital rights funders and practitioners to integrate climate justice within their strategies, operations, and grantmaking.
• Bringing people together to build coalitions, learn each other’s vocabulary, backgrounds etc., while taking into account the differences between the two movements:
  • Histories, vocabulary and political orientation
  • Adversarial vs cooperative relationship with private sector
• Providing space for actors from the Global South to define and document extractivist practices and solutions to these issues. “Extractivism” in the context of this brief refers to the formal and informal mining of minerals used in the production of technology in the Global South.

reports here.

We are living in a climate crisis: the science is clear, and we need to rapidly change to a more just and sustainable society. This includes investing in a sustainable internet, which is currently the world’s largest coal-powered machine. More than building sustainable internet infrastructure, we also need to examine how and where the internet aligns with the movements for climate and environmental justice—and where it works against them.

rampant greenwashing misinformation by fossil fuel companies, the internet’s ecological consequences are just some of the many complex problems at the intersection of climate justice and technology.

Despite this nexus between the internet and environment, we are only in the early stages of integrating philanthropic funding strategies across these intersections. Through a series of reports supported by Ford Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Ariadne, we are pleased to share research on the implications and intersections of climate justice for digital rights. While the primary audience for the research is digital rights funders or adjacent technology funders, we believe the work can be useful for other funders and organizations working across issues, given that the climate crisis and technology touch other fields related to human rights, from migration to land tenure and indigenous rights.

We come to this topic humbly, knowing that many practitioners have been thinking critically about these issues for a long time. We offer the following research as a starting place for digital rights funders who want to begin untangling climate implications for their work. Below you’ll find a series of eight different research pieces produced by four different organizations, each with their own networks and perspectives.

The Engine RoomAt the confluence of digital rights and climate & environmental justice, which provides an accessible and thoughtful overview on the climate and environmental justice issues that emerge from technological innovation. They provide an analysis of the environmental toll of digital infrastructures and information on climate disinformation, open data and climate monitoring, increased surveillance of environmental activists and land defenders, and migration justice. In addition, the report explores overlapping themes and challenges that can prevent the climate and digital rights movements from working together. Finally, it offers recommendations to digital rights funders on how to center the intersections of climate justice and technology in their work.

Next to the landscape analysis we supported seven issue briefs, each of which offer a deep dive into specific topics at the intersection of digital rights and climate justice such as governance, misinformation, open data, and extractivism. The goal of these issue briefs is to provide organizations who have been working on these topics to share their expertise and experience with the digital rights funders community.

Four key takeaways from At the confluence of digital rights and climate & environmental justice

1. Climate and tech movements can learn from and support each other: There is a lot of space for relationship building and collaboration between movements centered on climate and environmental justice and technology justice. Finding the most strategic moments to connect the two movements will be crucial, as will leveraging opportunities for shared learning and deep engagement on specific topics. Learning from other funders about intersectional and trust-based funding approaches can provide a path forward.
2. The Global North must follow leadership from the Global South: Digital rights organizations in the Global South have long been working on connecting the impacts of extractive industries and digital technology. Groups in the Global North must not only learn from their work, but follow suit. Increasingly, funders have highlighted the importance of shifting power to those most impacted, believing those closest to the problem are closest to the solution. As we reflect on investment in this intersection, there is an opportunity to “walk the talk” and resource groups in the Global South who have clearly demonstrated experience and creativity in developing impactful responses to the climate crisis.
3. Carbon is just the beginning:use of advanced cyberweapons to target and harm climate and environmental activists.
4. Data is at the heart of many of the problems and can also be part of the solution: Access to reliable climate and environmental data is key for remedying misinformation, driving policy agendas, and influencing public understanding and opinion. Tech companies are currently withholding important information related to critical issues like the water and energy usage of data centers and the efficacy of initiatives addressing climate misinformation. At the same time, large data models being developed by the tech sector are a huge driver of emissions and are increasingly central to big tech and their efforts to grow. Examining the intersection of climate, environment and data is critical.

Resources

Landscape ReportAt the confluence of digital rights and climate & environmental justice

Issue Briefs

• Building a High-Quality Climate Science Information Environment: The Role of Social Media
• At the interstice of digital rights and environmental justice. Four issue briefs to inform funding:
  • Mapping the gaps between digital rights and environmental justice actors in the global South
  • Environmental and digital rights: Exploring the potential for interplay and mutual reinforcement for better governance
  • Extractivism, mining and technology in the global South: Towards a common agenda for action
  • Addressing the impact of disinformation on environmental movements through collaboration
• Open Environmental Data Project & Open Climate
  • Climate Justice & the Knowledge Commons: Opportunities for the digital rights space
  • Environmental justice, climate justice, and the space of digital rights

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