At the Confluence of Digital Rights and Climate Justice

Metadata

• Author: The Engine Room
• Full Title: At the Confluence of Digital Rights and Climate Justice
• Category: articles
• Document Tags: #planet
• URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/35243264

Highlights

• While technology is being used to support these efforts, it can also be part of the problem: technological innovation is taking an environmental toll, climate justice activists face increasing digital attacks, social media platforms are full of unfounded claims about climate change, and many of the communities affected the most by the climate emergency continue to lack basic access to digital resources that are needed to adapt to, and mitigate effects of, the climate crisis – from internet access to reliable online information in their own language and cultural context. (View Highlight)
• DR refers to the norms and principles that focus on issues related to how people use, access, create or mitigate potential harms stemming from digital technologies and the internet. (View Highlight)
• : “the
  institutional conditions that are essential for the fair and equitable redistribution of power, resources and privileges,06
  and an explicit acknowledgment
  that oppressive and exclusive structures have created disparities among different groups in terms of their needs, resources and access to power.” (View Highlight)
• The EJ movement is rooted in an intersectional civil rights response to the environmental racism experienced by communities of colour and low-income communities in spaces where they “live, work, and play.”08
  EJ comes
  from a long, systemic lineage of concern around ecology, co-evolving with the civil rights movement to draw links between existing social injustices (i.e. racism and the distribution of environmental harms, particularly the pollution from industries disproportionately located in minority neighbourhoods). (View Highlight)
• CJ is a more recent term, having to do with the ongoing/intensifying climate crisis and its implications for economic justice and the right to a liveable planet. CJ draws on the same key observations of the EJ movement, namely the deeply inequitable nature of the impact of climate change, while building further on the importance of keeping grassroots solutions at the front and centre of their work. (View Highlight)
• We also look specifically at ‘green extractivism’ – the process of drawing on finite resources in extractive ways to develop ‘green’ technologies,13
  and ‘data
  extractivism’ – the process by which data on territories, lands, and people is used to continue the extraction of resources and expropriation of the commons. (View Highlight)
• In a number of discussions, participants flagged alignment in language, terminology, approaches to equity, and an analysis of regional power imbalances as important prerequisites for working together on overlapping issues. (View Highlight)
• For them, creating more cross-cutting agendas (such as ones that incorporate EJCJ) is a challenge that will require extra time and resources. Advocates, engineers, and lawyers in the DR and allied tech arenas also acknowledged their tendency to use tech jargon that’s inaccessible to outsiders and that can alienate potential collaborators. (View Highlight)
• Some EJ-CJ practitioners we spoke to explained they had only a vague sense of what issues fall under the umbrella of DR. An exception was issues around privacy and digital security, flagged by several as a clear and important area of long-running concern for land defenders and climate movements. (View Highlight)
• DR builds on individual rights, whereas EJ and CJ paradigms focus more on communities. While the DR movement has worked to transform this framing, one interviewee noted that the field still relies on individualistic framings of rights. (View Highlight)
• Several interviewees from across EJ-CJ and DR fields argue that meeting these targets requires a shift from endless growth to to ‘degrowth’: an economic contraction for richer nations accompanied by a shift from growthoriented economy to sufficiency-focused production. Instead of assuming that continued economic growth is possible in its current form, degrowth advocates are interested in figuring out how to enforce ‘limits to growth’ through changes in how we consume, produce, and sustain ourselves. (View Highlight)
• Alongside ‘degrowth’, ‘planetary boundaries’ and ‘postgrowth’ perspectives also ask whether it is possible to reconcile the current status quo with the urgent need to draw down carbon emissions. ‘Post-extractivism’ goes even further (View Highlight)
• centres social and ecological well-being instead of (over) production and (excess) consumption – goals that go beyond economic contraction and envision a new type of social relations between humans and between humans and the environment.29 (View Highlight)
• Some Big Tech companies, for example, have been found to be actively assisting fossil fuel companies to generate more precise and efficient techniques for fossil fuel extraction, through the application of machine learning. (View Highlight)
• This type of issue collision is now also taking place in ‘just transition’ initiatives: in order to develop ‘green technologies’, companies are extracting rare earth minerals like lithium and cobalt – a contradiction that has been termed ‘green extractivism’.32
  In the EU alone, demand for cobalt and lithium is expected to rise
  15- and 60-fold respectively, even as the mining of these minerals leads to dispossession and toxic pollution for many communities. (View Highlight)
• “The transition itself must be just and equitable; redressing past harms and creating new relationships of power for the future through reparations. If the process of transition is not just, the outcome will never be. Just Transition describes both where we are going and how we get there.”33 (View Highlight)
• All data-intensive actions have an environmental price, and some far more than others, but right now, as one interviewee explained, the resource intensive nature of digitisation and the extractive processes behind sustainable technologies using rare earth minerals are “the two most important externalities that a tech company or company dealing in data is putting on society to make more money.” (View Highlight)
• Interviewees called on both the DR and EJ-CJ movements to challenge the idea that digitisation and the ‘digital economy’ are somehow more sustainable by virtue of being digital, or ‘dematerialised’ – an idea that has been pervasive for several decades in ICT-climate dialogues.38
  One energy specialist argues that it’s
  now essential to break down this idea that the technology sector is somehow exceptional in relation to the energy use of other industries: (View Highlight)
• Paying attention to extractive labour relations behind the mobile applications we use daily, parsing the true energy costs of technological interventions like artificial intelligence, and accounting for the land that Big Tech data centres occupy (and pollute) will be critical, allowing for a better appreciation of environmental justice issues that have digital dimensions, but take shape in materially extractive ways. (View Highlight)
• The need to reliably measure the environmental impact of new technologies is perceived as an urgent priority. (View Highlight)
• However, RECs have no definite environmental impact: they don’t encourage more renewable energy to come online, and in many instances they say nothing about whether renewable energy is actually being used. (View Highlight)
• One interviewee pointed to carbon accounting wizardry and disingenuous use of jargon, highlighting tech companies who might, for example, account for their carbon emissions but fail to calculate the full spectrum of their emissions of methane gas (a significant driver of climate change). (View Highlight)
• Crucially, expanding data usage means using more resources. Big tech companies claim that the new data centres they’re building will run on renewable energy, and will therefore not be harmful to the environment, but an energy transition expert we spoke to questions this: (View Highlight)
• In Chile, where Google and Microsoft are expanding their data centres, the companies are diverting scarce local water sources and polluting the local water (View Highlight)
• systems in the process.58 In the Netherlands, plans by Meta and Microsoft to build
  new data centres have been met with controversy from local residents and governments, as the centres would absorb much of the new renewable energy coming online while offering few other local benefits. (View Highlight)
• There is no energy transition without energy reduction. (View Highlight)
• Optimising the efficiency of technical architectures is another strategy smaller initiatives are using to try and make their web and internet services more sustainable. This involves taking stock of inefficiencies – for example, looking at how much data is being sent and processed between their service and its end users – and seeing how aspects of their services (such as ‘page weight’ and the type of analytics being used) can be tweaked to make them less energy intensive.76 (View Highlight)
• Some interviewees emphasised that while IT infrastructure optimisation is important, more efficient or optimised infrastructures cannot on their own ‘solve’ the problems of planetary tech impacts. An energy transition specialist we spoke to argued that as more efficient websites and infrastructures are built, it’s essential to pair the drive for more efficiency and technical optimisation with a critical view on economic growth, lest more efficiency paradoxically drive more unsustainable growth.77 (View Highlight)
• Greenwashing thrives in an environment of information asymmetry. As such, a key facet of challenging greenwashing is gaining access to information that can allow governments and civil society actors to verify the claims of tech companies instead of relying on tech companies themselves to self-report. At a sectoral level, tackling the opacity and inconsistency of tech sustainability practices will require greater access to data, clear standards around carbon accounting and emissions calculations, and wider accessibility of emissions-counting software. (View Highlight)
• A sustainability expert we spoke to flagged the idea of equipping small and medium companies in the supply chains of Big Tech companies to undertake their own emissions accounting. By shining a light on different links of the supply chain, civil society, governments and citizens would have access to more granular information that would enable them to assess the accuracy of Big Tech emissions reporting. This process could also build broader awareness around areas of opacity in emissions accounting.86
  This interviewee stressed that “if we want to empower people to hold people to account, we need transparency beyond what’s regulated.” (View Highlight)
• assessing the harmful impacts of a technology from its production onwards – per the lifecycle approach – opens up the opportunity to consider labour and human rights violations perpetrated by companies against workers in the tech production process (starting from mining conditions up through factory work, warehouse work, and ‘precarious work’ tasks such as AI image labelling). (View Highlight)
• One important way of doing this involves taking the full ‘value chain’ or lifecycle of tech production and consumption into account when making assessments of impact in sustainability plans, transparency reports, and in EJ-CJ advocacy. One of our interviewees highlighted that the lifecycle approach opens up opportunities to bring sustainability assessments and human rights/digital rights impact assessments into closer dialogue.
  For example, assessing the harmful impacts of a technology from its production onwards – per the lifecycle approach – opens up the opportunity to consider labour and human rights violations perpetrated by companies against workers in the tech production process (starting from mining conditions up through factory work, warehouse work, and ‘precarious work’ tasks such as AI image labelling). (View Highlight)
• But there is growing evidence that extraction of the six minerals essential to the renewable energy industry – cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, nickel and zinc – is also responsible for land rights violations and environmental damage in other parts of the world. (View Highlight)
• data remains an expensive commodity on much of the African continent, and data infrastructure can be unevenly distributed, forcing individuals to commute long distances just to access the internet. (View Highlight)
• When it comes to climate advocacy, for many, simply getting online – where more and more climate activism is happening – can be a more tangible challenge than confronting other digital rights issues like privacy and surveillance. Without the internet, actors in the climate space cannot fully exercise their rights to access to information and participation; they also remain unable to connect to other regional/global struggles and campaigns.
  In particular, data remains an expensive commodity on much of the African continent, and data infrastructure can be unevenly distributed, forcing individuals to commute long distances just to access the internet. (View Highlight)
• climate-related disinformation continues to spread and grow online – a problem fanned by Big Tech platforms’ reluctance to forego digital advertising revenue from climate change denier lobbies and fossil fuel companies. The lack of clear legal mandates has also fostered inaction, allowing Big Tech to pursue ‘paths of least resistance’ in the form of elaborate fact-checking operations that fail to promptly counter disinformation because they’re either too slow, allowing controversial statements to spread while they’re being assessed, or only partial, giving offenders the chance to repeat the same cycle. (View Highlight)
• Conversations on access also led us to thoughtful exchanges about the enduring role of non-digital modes of communication like community radio, and the innovative second life Bluetooth/IVR technologies are having in densely forested, low-connectivity regions.107
  An emphasis on bridging the ‘digital divide’ has taken resources
  away from modes of communication that are still the most accessible in the global south. This insight requires, as one interviewee asserted, “getting real” (View Highlight)
• Another, related issue is the low level of linguistic diversity on the internet.109 Once
  people are online, they need content and communications in languages they can read. Without enabling participation in mother tongues – many of which are dialects without written scripts – the internet is far from achieving social inclusion. (View Highlight)
• “Language is an important part of inclusion – most of the work stops where the internet finishes – the digital needs to be connected to the oral … Justice starts with inclusion, with listening and solving problems and none of that happens if you keep your world on the internet and call it ‘digital’ and don’t link it with radio or audio. (View Highlight)
• Facebook has earned a revenue of 68 million USD per year from disinformation ads posted by known climate denier groups. (View Highlight)
• As such, there is a window for innovating on digital platforms that rely less on reading and writing, and incorporate oral participation instead. For example, organisations like CGNet Swara117
  are deploying Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
  technology to lower barriers to participation in democratic media processes ranging from election campaigns to public health drives. (View Highlight)
• Wikimedia Foundation118
  , for instance, is now working with a West
  African organisation to train young people in a few African countries to run Wikipedia edit-a-thons119
  and take control of some of the narratives around the global south and climate issues. (View Highlight)
• The persecution of those resisting land acquisition and forest encroachment by extractive industries has been going on for a long time, but digital tools’ ability to follow, surveil, and collect information without individuals’ knowledge has expanded governments’ and companies’ abilities to intimidate, harass, and in some cases even to murder, dissenters. (View Highlight)
• Digital security trainers also highlighted the importance of creating long-term technical capacity within environmental organisations: “If you create capacity within those inside the organisation and build on the capacity that’s already there, then they will know better what they need, and technical staff will stay longer.” (View Highlight)
• There is currently a wide array of community-led initiatives around the world collecting and sharing data in order to monitor air, water and soil quality, monitor biodiversity loss, and defend local communities against extractive companies. These kinds of initiatives facilitate engagement on environmental and climate issues beyond commercial, government, and academic spheres, allowing for more (View Highlight)
• societal engagement with environmental and climate governance.138 Initiatives have distributed low-cost sensors to inhabitants of cities and rural areas,139 provided drones to local communities to enable them to observe and document perpetrators of ecosystem destruction (such as oil contamination and deforestation), and equipped trees with auditory sensor networks to observe changes to the ecosystem. (View Highlight)
• people involved in citizen sensing initiatives said that one of the most important priorities for this field is to understand how collected data might be shared and stewarded in the most responsible and just way, and also leveraged most effectively for environmental and climate governance efforts.143
  Additionally, they raised the importance of understanding that tech and data use should be seen as secondary to community goals and needs, rather than an end in and of itself. (View Highlight)
• But while high-tech and quantitative data collection instruments might be perceived as more scientifically sound, they found that human testimony and oral knowledge was often just as, if not more, important: “sensor data is often the first element to be challenged in legal settings,” they said; “some judges have shown to be more sympathetic to direct community testimony.” (View Highlight)
• Relatedly, environmental data practitioners we spoke to said that amid the societal drive to collect ever-more data, the problem is often not a lack of data but other factors: for example, data might exist, but not be easily accessed; or it might be accessible, but not recorded in a standardised way that would enable it to be used widely in environmental and climate advocacy work. (View Highlight)
• Per one example shared with us, an open street map in India published drinking water locations for people needing clean water; this data was then used by corporations to buy up land and water rights in the area. In another case we learned about, sensors used by an environmental group to collect data about ecological changes in a forested area were misappropriated to conduct surveillance by antagonistic actors, who went on to violently suppress the local Indigenous community (View Highlight)
• But it’s unclear to the energy experts we interviewed to what degree smart grids, smart meters, and the prospect of equipping city infrastructure with sensors actually do represent an energy efficiency win; much of the evidence needed to support the claims of governments and commercial actors remains to be shown. (View Highlight)
• it’s important to fight the idea that local initiatives must always scale, noting a common pressure faced by small initiatives to expand their geographic and issue scope, expand the types of data they collect, and enter into commercial relationships with private actors in order to become financially sustainable – a pressure which has historically often resulted in the misappropriation of sensitive data.157
  In their view, in cases where a data collection
  initiative is community-driven, data should be stored locally and used for a limited set of use-cases agreed upon beforehand, with data collection practices based on a model of enthusiastic assent. They argue that these types of initiatives should be free of the pressure to ‘scale up’ or standardise the data following top-down standards created in other contexts. (View Highlight)
• Concern over data stewardship and governance models cuts across both DR and environmental and climate issues. Cross-cutting questions include thinking through what data should be collected, by whom; how it will be stored, used, or re-used; and how to ensure that data collection and sharing initiatives are not extractive of local communities.
  To address these questions, practitioners focused on this intersection of digital/ data and climate/environmental issues are exploring alternative data governance models which respect digital rights and Indigenous data sovereignty while using collected data to build a data commons. To prevent extractive dynamics, interviewees argue for the importance of establishing agreed-upon data sharing principles. (View Highlight)
• Addressing data issues in the space will also require taking stock of the technical infrastructures currently used to collect and analyse data, an area DR groups could potentially provide guidance with. Much of the data collected by sensor technologies is hosted with opaque commercial third parties, which puts goals and principles around responsible data use in jeopardy. (View Highlight)
• Recent research frames this move by global north countries, many of them responsible for the greater share of CO2 emissions globally, as these countries’ main response to the current climate crisis, building a de facto ‘Climate Wall’ – in other words, prioritising the militarisation of borders and surveillance of people on the move over investment in climate action. (View Highlight)
• As tactics deployed in one state tend to be exported and replicated elsewhere, continued research, documentation and monitoring of methods, types of tech and incidences of violation is important to the building of knowledge and to support advocacy – actors pursuing this work can leverage existing access to information legislation alongside other research methods. (View Highlight)