“They have announced the construction of a data center in my community. What do we do?” Data centers and their capacities are multiplying worldwide as artificial intelligence gains importance in the economy. How can we bridge the gap in access to information about the socio-environmental consequences of AI, specifically in Latin America?

Based on case studies from Brazil, Chile, and Querétaro in Mexico, we built DataCenterBoom!, a repository of information for communities and local authorities so that they have information available about why a data center is being built in their community, a catalog of its socio-environmental consequences, a section on how public policy has responded, as well as lessons learned from different local resistance movements to these infrastructures.

It has a Spanish and an English version, and we hope to have a Portuguese version soon 😊. If you are interested in the topic, please subscribe to the website to receive new reports and content, and give us feedback in the About section.

#English

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) had been considered in previous COPs, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025, marked a significant new phase in climate discussions. For the first time, AI was systematically included in the COP’s Action Agenda as a strategic theme.

However, despite the strong enthusiasm around AI's promises to help tackle climate change at COP30, very little attention was given to the other side of the AI ecosystem: its environmental impacts. Only a few side events and press conferences drew attention to how AI models and the infrastructures that power them are responsible for emitting high levels of CO₂ into the atmosphere and have also led to a heightened demand for minerals, water, and energy.

At the end of COP30 and in the context of the political discussions that must continue to be developed in future editions of the COP, we would like to express the following concerns regarding the public discourse on AI in the context of the climate and ecological crisis:

1. Artificial Intelligence is not a techno-solution to the climate and ecological crisis; moreover, AI increases the use of fossil fuels, raises greenhouse gas emissions, and thus jeopardizes the climate goals of countries with the highest concentration of AI data centers, such as China, the United States and the European Union. COP climate policies cannot be based on marketing discourse, lobbying, or magical thinking promoted by technology companies, but rather on current independent scientific evidence.

2. Artificial Intelligence is not just another natural resource or an inevitable force. Its use, adoption, and marketing in all aspects of political, social, and economic life is driven by its owners, a handful of large and powerful technology companies (concentrated mainly in two countries, the United States and China) whose incentive is to expand their capital, not to mitigate the climate and ecological crisis. COP climate policies cannot be designed to serve the economic well-being of this handful of already powerful companies: this encourages the concentration of power and dangerously strengthens their role, especially in other low-income and developing countries.

3. AI generates socio-environmental impacts far beyond CO₂ emissions. As multiple international reports based on scientific evidence show, AI is an industry that requires numerous minerals, large amounts of land, and vast quantities of fresh water and energy, which is causing a series of socio-environmental impacts around the world that go beyond Scope 1 CO₂ emissions – also demanding a serious accounting of Scope 3, the category that exposes the full lifecycle impacts across mining, supply chains, manufacturing and end-of-life. Yet COP30’s outcomes did not meaningfully incorporate these impacts, leaving a major gap in how countries assess and report the climate footprint of digital infrastructure. Looking forward, it is essential that national climate commitments (Nationally Determined Contributions – NDCs) explicitly include the emissions and resource use associated with data centers and AI supply chains, ensuring transparency and accountability in a sector whose climate impact is rapidly expanding. We are concerned that decision-makers believe that these impacts can be miraculously solved by technological innovation alone, which the evidence rules out, for example, given Jevons' paradox in AI.

4. AI’s hunger for energy threatens a just energy transition. As one of the most energy-intensive industries of the 21st century, the genuine interest of the companies behind AI at the COP is to secure access to fossil fuels in the short term and renewables in the medium term, the latter being considered a techno-solution to their CO₂ emissions, ignoring the social, economic, and environmental costs that renewable energy production currently entails, especially in communities that have not caused the climate and ecological crisis. The AI's appetite for renewable energy is such that, without political and democratic mediation, we denounce that the energy transition, especially in developing countries, will be designed for the needs of a handful of foreign technology corporations rather than for local communities and industries.

5. Governments must protect their people and ecosystems, not the industry interests. We urge decision-makers in national governments, particularly in developing countries participating in the COP, to reaffirm their commitment to scientific evidence and the well-being of their communities, biodiversity, and local industries. It is essential not to adopt AI uncritically. We are at a critical juncture in addressing the climate and ecological crisis, and any enhancement of AI without proper regulatory, socio-environmental and ethical checks will only strengthen the power of global tech corporations, ultimately undermining climate ambitions worldwide.

Signed by:

• The Latin American Institute for Terraforming
• Law and Technology Research Institute of Recife (IP.rec)
• Coding Rights
• Laboratory of Public Policy and Internet – LAPIN
• Brazilian Institute for Consumer Protection – Idec
• Heinrich Böll Foundation

#English

By Paz Peña, coordinator of the Latin American Institute of Terraforming.

Arrive and operate. Or, as the Minister of Science says, data centers in Chile are ready to “plug and play.” Days ago, I attended a virtual meeting in Spain, where we discussed regulatory trends related to data centers. They asked me about the situation in Latin America and Chile. I replied – to the surprise of some foreigners- that trends here are toward deregulation. There are many examples, but let's talk about Chile in light of LaBot news.

The government (famous for calling itself ecologist) approved a regulatory change that means that new data centers built in Chile will not have to undergo any environmental impact assessment; they will only have to comply with sector-specific procedures, such as obtaining building permits. A change in the thresholds for diesel storage gives rise to this new scenario. As journalist Francisca Skoknic says in LaBot:

Curiously, data centers are not environmentally assessed for their energy impact or water consumption, but because they store large volumes of diesel to run backup power equipment in case of outages. The SEIA regulation in point ñ3 establishes that the storage threshold for flammable substances is 80,000 liters. With the change made by the Council of Ministers, that limit rises to 1,000 tons, or 1 million liters, which is what the Ministry of Health's sectoral regulation requires for the storage of hazardous substances.

For the government, the changes to the thresholds only affect projects that do not have a significant environmental impact. In other words, despite scientific evidence, such as that contained in the 2024 UNCTAD reports, data centers in Chile do not have a significant environmental impact: they are ready to “plug and play.”

We have been aware of this trend toward deregulation for some time. The Minister of Science said in the press when announcing the National Data Center Plan that “it aims to identify and make available land that has internet connectivity, access to renewable energy, pre-approved permits for the installation of these data centers, and where companies can invest and set up quickly. Plug and play.” These are the sectoral permits that the government intends to grant as replacements for the current environmental restrictions, which environmental organizations have denounced as an attempt to deregulate rather than enhance environmental permits – a phenomenon that the industry and the government refer to as “permisología” (permit culture). In addition, the national plan establishes a “Clean Production Agreement,” a voluntary agreement between the productive sector and the State that sets specific sustainability goals to reduce the environmental impact of industrial activities. Furthermore, we cannot deny that the data center industry lobby is, as they have said publicly, in favor of deregulation.

I've heard government representatives publicly state that the plan is not about deregulation but rather an attempt to bring order, ensure sustainability, and prevent the uncontrolled growth of data centers in municipalities such as Quilicura. The truth is that we are witnessing public policies that are not only based on science but have also failed to incorporate the concerns of sectors other than a specific industry.

#English

[Aquí en español] The zero draft of the Global Digital Compact (GDC) was published a few days ago. Regarding its position on digitalization and its environmental impacts, we at the Latin American Institute of Terraforming believe it is important to emphasize the following:

• It is good news that the GDC encourages its technical bodies to standardize data on sustainability. As an institute, we have proposed this urgent need in various contributions to United Nations bodies.
• More generally, we are concerned about the need for more diversity in the participation of the global south, as this analysis shows (which does not even delve into whether there is any particular dominance of global south economies in these inputs). This dominant vision of the global north not only makes its own political and economic interests dominate the draft but also its theoretical and practical approach to such key challenges as the climate and ecological crisis that the planet is experiencing. In this sense, the draft itself fails in the first principle it proclaims: inclusiveness. In these times of multiple crises, the United Nations must ask itself in its processes what “promoting and enabling diversity” means in concrete terms, firmly believing that this is the key to understanding the complexity of the challenges, setting ambitious goals for participation, and leading by example.
• We believe that this may be one of the reasons why its principle on “Environmental Sustainability” is disappointing. Firstly, it begins with a technocentric discourse already criticized in the forums on the climate crisis organized by this same organization: the idea that technology (this time, digital) can solve environmental, climate, and sustainability challenges. That idea is, to say the least, debatable if the scientific evidence is reviewed. This empty discourse of techno-optimism – driven by economic interests over direct and indirect evidence, public policy, and community rights – is more likely to end up fueling than mitigating the ecological and environmental crises.
• Similarly, it is dangerous that the socio-environmental effects -written with dangerous generality in this zero draft- are after the techno-optimistic discourse because it underlies in importance the objective evidence of how digitalization -without adequate control- not only has vast and growing socio-environmental effects but may even jeopardize the planet's goals regarding mitigating the climate and ecological crisis. The latter is the huge, complex, and unique objective that, in our view, the GDC should have.
• The dangerous vagueness we are talking about lies in the idea that technology “consumes materials.” Being specific in this point not only helps to raise concrete targets for the GDC but can strengthen the relevance of the 2030 Agenda: “Material consumption” hides specific things like fresh water (which endangers both human water consumption and the use of water for other activities in many communities), intensive mining of metals and minerals (which pollutes territories and affects and displaces humans and non-humans), as well as uses increasing energy that, if fossil fuel, emits more carbon footprint, but even if it's “green energies,” brings with it a series of socio-environmental effects that affect, in particular, populations already in vulnerability due to the impact of the climate crisis. The lack of specificity of what environmental sustainability means, as we know, favors toxic policies such as greenwashing.

For the rest, the draft continues to talk about technologies – as if they emerged on their own – and not about the differentiated economic actors that develop them and how their concentration and power today determine discussions that should be much deeper and more complex, such as what environmental sustainability means in digitization. Obviously, this abstraction of big capital is a convenient move, at least geopolitically. But can the big tech companies – which concentrate the economic power of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and whose objective is accumulation for infinite economic growth on a finite planet – be environmentally sustainable today? Can big tech use of green energy even be desirable if, like Microsoft, a data center is opened globally every three days? Where can we have this discussion in the global politics of digitization?

No one is surprised by the limitations that the United Nations has in the geopolitical context for more critical speeches, and it is not about attacking it vacuously, as conservative and fascist forces do. However, when discussing a draft, which will then enter into multiple negotiations, one would expect more ambition. In times of multiple and horrific crises, history belongs to the people and communities that dare.

#English

As the figures show, when it comes to the climate crisis, neither the responsibilities nor the consequences are shared equally. The most impoverished people and countries suffer the most from this crisis, even though they bear the least responsibility. This crisis has been caused by the industrial development of developed countries in the first place and displaced peripheral countries by disrupting production chains. Thus, in high-income countries, where only one-sixth of the world's population lives, it is estimated that they emit 44 times more CO2 than those with lower incomes.

In this context, climate justice is fundamentally about paying attention to how climate change impacts people differently, unequally, and disproportionately and remedying these injustices fairly and equitably. Its objectives are to reduce marginalization, exploitation, and oppression and to strengthen equity and justice. In other words, climate justice denounces reductionist ways of viewing the problem of global warming as a scientific or merely economic issue and, in this critical approach, relocates the problem to moral and justice concerns. In this, intersectional feminism plays a key role, as it draws attention to the power relations that converge to affect the climate and ecological crisis, with gender, race, class, and other social hierarchies crucial to the analysis of climate justice.

Although these injustices are part of the public policy discussion around the climate and ecological crisis, climate justice is often conceived of as an afterthought to a policy rather than its central objective, resulting in people being forgotten in favor of purely economic transition objectives. This is the case of an increasingly popular concept that directly concerns digital policies: twin transitions. With this latter approach, industrial economies seek to link the urgent transition to green energy that the world needs with the digitalization of the economy, on the understanding that both transitions (green and digital) are equally dependent on each other and will be the key to climate mitigation.

This paper aims to understand how the digital transition, in a context of twin transitions, must be thought through from the perspective of climate justice because otherwise, those left furthest behind by digitalization, who are also those who suffer the most from the climate and ecological crisis, will once again be forgotten. To do so, it critically reviews the concept of twin transitions and focuses on the connectivity needs of the rural women's community of Táva Guaraní in the department of San Pedro, Paraguay.

In a discussion on twin transitions that are being driven from the Global North, we consider it essential that public policy that seeks to bridge the transition to green energy with the digitalization of the economy not only listens to the communities most affected by the climate crisis and the lack of meaningful digital connectivity but is an essential inspiration for putting justice at the heart of twin transitions. For this reason, this paper also focuses on providing some public policy recommendations for stakeholders, including advocating for an international solidarity fund for infrastructure and connectivity for climate mitigation, following the logic and experience of the loss and damage compensation funds that drive the UN climate mechanisms (special funds from rich countries that seek to compensate for the negative consequences of climate change in the most affected countries that did not contribute to the crisis).

An unofficial English translation of the original report can be accessed here.

#English

The 21st century is marked by two major processes: the climate and ecological crisis and the fast digitalization of the planet.

Achieving sustainable development goals cannot only mean focusing on the possibilities of digitization but also taking the socio-environmental impacts of digital technologies seriously not to jeopardize SDGs such as “sustainable cities and communities,” “responsible consumption and production,” “climate action,” and “life on land.”

The dominance of techno-capitalist economic logic in public and private technological developments is characterized primarily by an ever-increasing reliance on vast amounts of infinitely growing data and resources, which are also often geared towards producing “customer profiles” to drive ever-increasing consumption.

This logic has had clear repercussions for human rights -especially in the global south- and the sustainability of digitization throughout its life cycles: from the enormous need for natural resources required for manufacturing digital infrastructures, including the increasing exploitation of minerals and the use of vast amounts of freshwater, to the growing demand for energy and its carbon footprint production, as well as its constant display of toxic waste driven by the industry's programmed obsolescence.

Moreover, technological systems managed by companies or governments are becoming increasingly powerful in society; however, the participation of the people in its decision-making, especially the communities most affected by the socio-environmental impacts of their infrastructure, is scarce.

Due to these challenges, at least two principles and commitments among stakeholders should be considered:

One: Digital developments must respect planetary boundaries.

Digitalization must develop and prosper without threatening its ecosystem or sacrificing the integrity of the biosphere and respecting the diversity and plurality of cultures and communities in the territories where digital technologies are deployed, materially or digitally.

And two: Access to environmental justice is a fundamental goal of digital governance through strengthening collective and environmental rights and meaningful and broader participation processes.

Digital governance must strengthen environmental and collective rights so that digital developments do not violate the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. Moreover, social and environmental inequalities must be at the center of “digital governance action” since the only way to counteract the climate and ecological crisis is to work against them and their different manifestations.

Thanks,

#English

The technologies global production chain begins in El Estor, Guatemala, with nickel and rare earth elements extraction to support the world's digital infrastructure. Its mining has polluted Lake Izabal, exterminated biodiversity, and sickened and depleted indigenous populations, but in the name of techno-capitalism and its progress, who cares.

The technologies global production chain begins with exploiting lithium in salt flats in the Andean triangle between Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. Its mining has exterminated unique biodiversity and left-indigenous populations without water, threatening their survival. But a desert, they say, is a no man's land; who cares.

The technologies global production chain begins with illegal gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon, which has brought pollution, violence, and bloodshed to the limits of horror. That the big technology companies have ended up buying that gold was just a mistake; techno-capitalism in the 21st century is “green,” we are told.

To the digital rights community, it is time to ask ourselves: where do human rights and social justice begin when we talk about digital technologies?

Why do we continue to think that our human rights work begins and ends when a device is turned on and off?

What do impact assessments include when we talk about business and human rights?

To what extent are we defending the rights of indigenous populations and the biodiversity that sustains life?

We are facing a planet in flames, and the technocapitalist economic logic in the 21st century will take us to environmental limits that we do not even suspect. And the technological public policies of the 21st century must understand this with creativity and commitment.

And I know that in such a complex world, it is time for many things, and it is overwhelming, but please let us not give up extending bonds of solidarity and struggle with all those affected by the global technology chain.

Hopefully, this small session will be one more step in that direction.

#English

The map developed by Coding Rights clearly shows the material basis of digital technologies and how this material base has a differentiated power dynamic between North and South, but also between East and West. And the map makes more visible the global chain of production of digital technologies that, as in all capitalism, displaces the socio-environmental effects to the most marginalized populations.

But I would also like to reflect on something crucial for any analysis of digitalization in the 21st century: the climate and ecological crisis we are experiencing, but in its geopolitical sense.

Economic hegemony in the 21st century is being defined on two closely related fronts: who dominates the generation of green energy and who dominates the generation of cutting-edge digital technologies. This is the great economic fight of the 21st century between the United States, China, and the European Union.

And they are related because both green energy and digital technologies share the need for the same minerals, to such an extent that both transitions have produced a mining boom that has boosted the demand for all the periodic table elements, such as lithium, copper, cobalt, rare earth elements, etc.

And when there is a mining boom, there will always be various crises regarding human rights and social justice, basically due to the fact that there is no such thing as “sustainable mining.” Mining has enormous costs on biodiversity, indigenous cultures, and people's health. In addition, the mining boom pushes new mining projects to be developed regardless of the socio-environmental costs. It also encourages illegal mining, which means atrocities such as child labor, displacement, and extermination of indigenous populations.

In this context, the European Commission pushes approaches such as the “Twin Transitions,” in which it is proposed that in order to have an energy transition, it is also necessary to have a digital transition. So, to meet the climate goals of the Global North, everything must be digital.

But “Twin Transitions” concept is not supported by scientific consensus. Moreover, it is admittedly a geopolitical approach that helps the European Union not only to have a “politically correct” proposition to look for new mineral supplier countries but also helps Europeans to dispute new markets because, thanks to the idea that the way to becoming “green” is that all the planet must be digital, now techno-capitalism can have a robust health in the middle of the most critical crisis that we ever faced.

This is where I invite you to reflect, in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, on what it will mean for our lives in the 21st century if the powerful players of techno-capitalism continue to conquer new markets and become critical players now in the political context of climate and ecological crisis.

To end my intervention, I want to suggest Coding Rights include in this map a quote that the Spaniard, Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said last year: “Europe is a garden,” while “the rest of the world [...] is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden”.

And let me tell you, dear Josep Borrell, amid the climate and ecological crisis, long live the jungle!

#English

The Latin American Institute of Terraforming was present at the panel “Solidarity not solutionism: digital infrastructure for the planet”, and this was our first five-minute intervention to deepen the conversation.

I want to introduce the idea of techno-capitalism instead of talking only about big techs, in the understanding that although big tech is an excellent example of techno-capitalism, I believe that it is the “techno-capitalist ideology” also adopted as hegemonic logic by most digital developments -even by states- that must be fought as a solution to the climate and ecological crisis.

Basically, because, as Mél Hogan says, techno-capitalism implies “big data ecologies”, i.e. the creation of an infrastructure generally placed in foreign territories, specially conditioned to infinite growth, with intensive exploitation of natural resources to operate. If everything is subject to datification, digital infrastructures become more intensive in their consumption of natural resources. And that intensive infrastructure, in all its life cycle, affects human and non-human communities, which tend to be the bodies that matter least to capitalism.

This is why the false solution of the so-called “twin transitions” is dangerous, primarily as understood by the European Commission, where the competitiveness of Europe in the global economy is by far the first priority and where the complementarity transitions are more near a geopolitical idea than actual scientific truth.

One, due to the indirect effects of techno-capitalist digitalization, we will likely have a digital rebound effect in many industries. Hence, it is at least strange to seriously believe that they are complementary transitions when conclusive evidence is lacking.

But more importantly, to say that they are “twin transitions” is to accept that both green energies and digital technologies are the industries where the control of the world economy is being played out between China, the United States and the European Union. Thus, the “twin transition” concept is a more economical one than a “green solution” to the crisis.

But I want to return to the issue of techno-capitalism as the logic to be suspected as an approach to the climate crisis, not only looking at how big tech is portraying itself as a friend of the environment but also at initiatives that have much better press in terms of “green techs”, but that continues with techno capitalist logics.

And here, taking advantage of the fact that I am in a European forum, I want to bring Fairphone into the discussion. In their last book, Adi Kuntsman & Esperanza Miyake do a fascinating analysis of the images on the Fairphone website where, magically, the white bodies are the ones that repair, and the coloured bodies are the ones working in mines, but not just any mine: “socially responsible mines” according to the company. By the way, Fairphone is holding a series of conversations in Chile to see sustainable lithium extraction methods. But this green tech company, instead of first coordinating a conversation with the indigenous communities affected, chose to ally with large German companies of electric vehicles, that is, the big capital that today is part of a severe socio-environmental crisis at the Salar de Atacama in Chile.

It's like teaming up with Google to see a sustainable way to exploit personal data.

Adi Kuntsman & Esperanza Miyake state (and I strongly agree) that we cannot reduce a social justice problem to a feel-good consumption practice of European customers. This may give us a clue where we need to go in alternatives to techno-capitalism as a response to the climate and ecological crisis.

I don't want to extend further; I leave the conversation open for a collective reflection.

Thanks!

#English

First, the digital economy and its environmental impact is a growing topic of importance for civil society grouped in CSISAC (Civil Society Information Society Advisory Council). And we're delighted to share some insights here.

We want to start framing the conversation by saying that, without any doubt, digital technology is playing an essential role in the way humanity is mitigating the climate crisis. Without going any further, satellites, sensors, drones, big data, and artificial intelligence are fundamental tools, precisely, to understand the climate and ecological crisis we are experiencing.

However, not any digitization is desirable per se for climate and the environment. And we can see this clearly from the evidence gathered in the latest report on climate mitigation by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In that document, we can conclude that there are two urgent challenges that digitization is facing today regarding its climate and environmetal impact:

Digitalization's direct and indirect harmful effects on greenhouse gas emissions. Direct effects refer to the increased energy demand because of the use of digital devices and infrastructures and their associated carbon emissions. Let me give you a couple of very concrete examples: The XBOX gaming console has the most significant carbon footprint of any Microsoft device due to the electricity people use while playing video games. Moreover, some countries are starting to apply different levels of moratoriums for new permits for hyperscale data centres because of their energy impact.

But also indirect effects are very relevant (scope three emissions). For example, the digital economy, AI, the internet of things, and video games, among many others -and I'm citing the latest IPCC report here- can lead to many new products and applications that are likely to be efficient in their own right but can also lead to unintended changes or absolute increases in product demand and its consequential uprise of carbon emissions (what we call digital rebound effect). For example, the ITU has also acknowledged that the rebound effect is expected to remain high, and energy policies may need to consider potential losses in energy saving due to this effect.

By all this, I mean that we have a very complex problem of energy use, which will probably be impossible to solve if we only rely on technological innovation for energy efficiency. 

We also want to acknowledge another challenge, especially important for the majority of the world: stop thinking that digital technology is green only if it is energy-efficient. There are other socio-environmental effects of technological infrastructure that will be key in the development of the tech industry in the coming years. Therefore, we need to take urgent action on the following:

• The consumption of freshwater by data centres, especially in the context of rising droughts because of climate change. You can see more and more movements opposing data centre buildings in super different places, from Chile to the Netherlands, Ireland, etc.
• The increase of toxic e-waste due to digital devices. In addition, e-waste is still not properly regulated, especially in the global south.
• The increase in intensive mining for digitization. These resources overlap with the minerals needed for the energy transition and exacerbate socio-environmental conflicts and human rights violations, again, especially in the majority of the world. 

So, you can have a cellphone with energy efficiency in your hands but containing minerals illegally extracted from the indigenous Brazilian Amazon.

Is that green technology?

We need to think beyond this, which is today my invitation to all stakeholders.

Thanks!

***

#English