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11 min readThe Answer is Not AI! Statement of Solidarity with The Answer Is Us campaign
statement
Authors: Laboratório de Políticas Públicas e Internet, Instituto de Defesa de Consumidores, Coding Rights, Green Web Foundation, Green Screen Coalition
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Leia a versão em português da declaração de solidariedade.
In support of The Answer Is Us campaign, we share this statement of solidarity and reaffirm the core demands of the campaign.
As civil society organizations in Brazil and across the globe working on digital rights and tech justice for many years, we are deeply concerned about today’s technology trajectories that threaten people, territories, and life-sustaining systems everywhere. As it’s currently being developed, artificial intelligence further drives exploitation of territories and a carbon-intensive, surveillance-based future. We are deeply concerned with the centralization of tech power, its vast impacts on the environment and communities who live at sites of extraction and manufacturing, and how these technologies are used to further accelerate harms and inequalities.
At COP30, we stand with indigenous peoples and frontline communities resisting extraction and demanding their territorial sovereignty. Ancestral knowledge, collective struggle, and healthy societies affirm that technology must serve people and territories. Digital infrastructures must be built within planetary limits and guided by justice, care, and the self-determination of indigenous peoples and land-connected communities.
1. LAND RIGHTS
Technologies should serve the needs of all peoples and ecosystems that inhabit the territories. Yet digital infrastructures are often imposed without consent, repeating colonial patterns of exploitation and destruction. Tech megaprojects take advantage of long-standing disenfranchisement and appropriation of land from indigenous communities, and they rely on the lack of oversight and enforcement of indigenous rights to land. Protecting territories also means protecting our data, our knowledge, our cultural ways of life, and our right to decide which technologies enter our lives, ensuring that technological development respects life, culture, and ecological balance.
2. ZERO DEFORESTATION
A truly just digital transition requires zero deforestation and zero tolerance for technological projects that deplete ecosystems and exploit communities. Deforestation and data extractivism share the same logic: the transformation of life into a commodified resource. Digital industries, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and platform economies depend on and exploit geopolitical power inequalities, rare minerals, massive energy, and water consumption, and the precarious labor that fuels it. All of this rapid expansion is irresponsible and risks deepening socio-environmental degradation.
3. NO TO FOSSIL FUELS! NO TO MINING IN OUR TERRITORIES!
We demand transparency and accountability for emissions from data centers and the AI supply chain, including their impacts on communities, land, water, and biodiversity, and we support calls to limit the energy demand and the construction of new data centers. The expansion of AI is driving fossil fuel use directly through gas-powered data centers and indirectly by pushing overall electricity demand beyond existing and planned renewable capacity. Meanwhile data centers are sweeping up renewables needed by other sectors to decarbonize. This pressure undermines climate goals and drains resources from critical public sectors, and in the Global South it deepens extractive patterns of mineral extraction and large-scale energy projects that often bypass local governance and environmental oversight. Data centers must only be powered by new and additional renewable energy, and no fossil fuels should be burned at any point in the entire tech supply chain.
4. PROTECT DEFENDERS! PROTECT OUR WAYS OF LIFE!
We stand with environmental defenders. Protecting the protectors is how we build viable futures rooted in care, solidarity, and respect for the planet’s limits. We demand protection for the defenders of human, environmental, and territorial rights who face threats for exposing corporate abuse and resisting the destruction of their lands. Indigenous peoples, land-connected communities, and Black and Brown urban communities are standing up against the installation of data centers and energy projects without consultation or consent. They embody the fight against a development model that violates rights and erases traditional ways of life.
5. DIRECT ACCESS TO CLIMATE FINANCE
Climate finance should support science embedded in territories and fund Indigenous knowledge systems through territorial technology transfer. Climate finance should catalyze a diversity of technology pathways and establish legally, commercially and politically binding protocols for data governance. It should also fund community stewardship, ethical data governance and meaningful connectivity. Climate finance must not entrench monocultural notions of innovation that privilege high-tech, extractive models.
6. PARTICIPATION WITH REAL POWER
Real participation means that communities hold decision-making power at every stage of knowledge creation about their territories. Participation must be defined by community consent protocols, recognition of citizen-generated data, and territorial oversight of environmental licensing and data stewardship, and real decision making power about both the infrastructure buildout and deployment of technologies. Real participation supports Indigenous and local mapping practices that offer a plurality of climate adaptation. Data collected “from above” must not displace knowledge from below.
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Signatories
Accolades
AI Policy Lab
Aspiration
Arctic Centre
Attac Norway
BetterTech
Bits & Bäume
Bundesverband Green Software
Center for International Environmental Law
Clean Air Action Group
Código Sur
Coding Rights
Coletivo Digital
Concordia University/independent
Conectas Direitos Humanos
Cooperativa Sulá Batsú
Critical infrastructure lab
Data & Society
Data For Good
De Donutlobby
Defend Democracy
Digital Action
DiraCom - Direito à Comunicação e Democracia
Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR)
Existential Risk Observatory
Faculty Staff Divestment Network
Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations
Freedom internet
Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and Northern Ireland)
Fundación Chile Sin Ecocidio
Gillian Andrews
Green Coding Solutions
Green Web Foundation
HAMACA
Idec - Instituto de Defesa de Consumidores
Institute for Advanced Study
IP.rec - Law and Technology Research Institute of Recife
IPANDETEC
Irish Council for Civil Liberties - Enforce
Jena, Florian Rasche
Kairos Fellows
Ketan Joshi
Kleindatenverein
LAPIN - Laboratory of Public Policy and Internet
La Quadrature du Net
Open Energy Transition
Pimentalab - Universidade Federal de São Paulo
Red Tierra Común
Rooted Futures Lab
SEEKCommons project
Sociotechnical AI Systems Lab
Somali Human Rights Association
Sussex Digital Humanities Lab
TEDIC
The Legal Resources Centre
Tierra Común
Tierra Comun Cooperative
Tu Nube Seca Mi Río
UCD
Umeå university
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
University of Amsterdam/Institute for Information Law
B-LSTS
Wageningen University & Research\
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Air pollution
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Wittenberg, Ariel. 2023. Coal Power Kills a ‘Staggering’ Number of Americans. Scientific American, August 11, 2023
Energy and emissions
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Walton, Jo Lindsay, Natalie Huegler, Faosiyat Tiamiyu-Tijani, et al. 2024. The Cloud and the Climate: Navigating AI-Powered Futures. Preprint, Sussex Digital Humanities Lab.
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Greenwashing and false solutions
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Steffen, Alex. 2016. Predatory Delay and the Rights of Future Generations. Medium, April 29, 2016
Hardware
Bordage, Frederic, Lorraine de Montenay, Sofia Benqassem, Julie Delmas-Orgelet, Firmin Domon, Damien Prunel, Caroline Vateau, and Etienne Lees Perasso. 2021. Behind the Figures: Understanding the Environmental Impacts of ICT and Taking Action.
Chen, Ann, and Ingrid Burrington. 2023. Manufacturing: The Semiconductor Is an Accretion of Place. Geographies of Digital Wasting. 2023
Smolaks, Max. 2022. Nvidia’s H100 – What It Is, What It Does, and Why It Matters Data Center Knowledge. March 23, 2022
Justice
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Velkova, Julia. 2024. Dismantling Public Values, One Data Center at the Time. Reimagining Public Values in Algorithmic Futures, University of Helsinki. February 19, 2024
Market concentration
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Water
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