Authors: Green Screen Coalition

We’re two years after the kickoff of the Green Screen Catalyst Fund—an offering that resulted from several years of convening movements working on digital rights and climate & environmental justice. Today we’re publishing a report about what we’re learning from this fund which accompanies the next cycle of investment, the Network Leadership Grants.

With relatively modest means but with a lot of heart, the Catalyst Fund set out to invest in this tension: supporting life-affirming alternatives while repairing planetary harms from “digital” tech.

Dive into the report

What we’re learning

01: Understanding the stakes of the geopolitical “AI race” and the way it exacerbates harm on people and the planet is an urgent and critical strategic choice. Philanthropic actors are (still) in a position to make this choice, yet often are complicit in pushing the hype.

02: Resourcing strategies must connect local struggles, trans-regionally and trans-nationally. Local knowledge must also be connected to “big picture” global decision-making forums.

03: There is no “single solution”. We must uplift and resource diverse approaches to tackle emerging challenges such as social-environmental investigations of digital infrastructures, platforms for community-generated environmental data, visual storytelling, and visioning of other ecological and technical cosmologies.

What’s next

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 and other massive-scale digital technologies are further driving exploitation of land and people towards a carbon-intensive, surveillance-based future. We are seeing increasing 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. Meanwhile, civil space is shrinking, its funding kneecapped, and climate action and resistance is becoming criminalized.

Since criminalization is increasing and funding is decreasing, we need to work to get money to right groups that are offering real solutions to meet this moment. Part of our work is to advocate and build bridges within philanthropy to support movements who tackle these intertwined challenges–environmental collapse and expanding tech infrastructures–and redirect attention towards fundamental movements for land and water. When we see our goals aligned with existing movements, we realise that we are mightier than it may seem. The scale of challenges has escalated, but so has our collective opposition and coordination–new allyships are forming with environmental and social movements around the world.

Are you a grantmaker looking for environmentally responsible approaches to tech alternatives or strengthening social movements in their responses to tech extractivism?

Read the report and get in touch with us if you want to work together to support this incredible field.

Are you an individual, collective or network working actively at the intersection of climate or environmental justice and digital rights and need support to sustain your work?

We just launched the second round of the Catalyst Fund that we are calling Network Leadership Grants. You can read the call for nominations on our website. Nominate yourself or others in your network until March 15th 2026 at 23.59 CET.

The Green Screen Catalyst Fund

In September 2023, we launched an open call for the Green Screen Catalyst Fund to award over $450K from our funding partners Internet Society Foundation, Ford Foundation, Luminate Strategic Initiatives, and Mozilla Foundation. The fund built on commissioned research and convening the coalition had supported at the intersection of digital rights and climate justice over the previous 2 years. The investments were dedicated to cross-territorial strategies, weaving thematic threads across movements, and carving out pathways to repair harms.

In May 2024, 18 grantees were awarded for work across topics like:

• Articulating environmental impacts of digital infrastructures
  • Like semi-conductor manufacturing in Taiwan and Korea or AI data centers in Querétaro, Mexico or data center expansion in Europe
• Investigating the materiality and extraction for technological supply chains
  • past-present, transitory and future cosmologies of tech infrastructure in Africa
• Developing community-generated environmental data
  • interactive maps documenting burned areas in the Bolivian Amazon adjacent to indigenous communities or community stewardship of carbon-sequestering forests in Indonesia
• Storytelling from communities who experience disproportionate harm
  • films by and for Yucatan Maya about their ecologies and the impact of megaprojects
• Imagining alternative climate & tech futures
  • co-designing autonomous and community-based regenerative technologies in Mexico or connecting environmental and digital rights movements between Abya Yala and Europe

The Grantee Report

The world–socially, politically and ecologically–has shifted dramatically since then, although today’s trajectories build on many patterns in play years ago. We perceive many worlds simultaneously: ones where community-built regenerative technologies thrive and cosmologies from the Majority world shape our relationships to digital tools and living ecosystems, and ones that suffer from increasing tech-enabled violence and the centralisation of power with extractive industries intensifying centuries of dispossession and disenfranchisement.

After the close of the grant period in October 2025, we commissioned a report to showcase the collective body of work. We are overjoyed to finally share this report, written by Andreea Belu and designed by Berenice Zambrano, which reflects on our learnings and demonstrates the impact of the fund. The report outlines the heart of our field-supporting approach:–trust itself is a form of movement infrastructure.

We encourage you to slowly read through the report to learn about each project. Together they offer novel tools for advocacy, territorial struggles for land reclamation, creative socio-technical solutions from communities most impacted, and collective coordinated action for technology and climate fora. The work reflected contains the labor and brilliance of many more than the 18 grantees represented. Many of the grantees have found common ground with each other, advising and contributing to each other’s work over the course of the two years.

We hope the report is useful for anyone interested in learning about the intersection, about this approach to grantmaking and also for peer funders looking to support this type of work in the future. Thank you to everyone who has supported the work from operations, events, grants management, advisors and the incredible network.