This New Fund's Working at the Intersection of Climate Justice and Digital Rights

Lithium mining in Argentina. Photo: Freedom_wanted/shutterstock

At first glance, digital rights and climate justice may seem like two separate issues. The two, however, intersect in a number of critical ways. The internet, for example, is "the world's largest coal-powered machine." Beyond that, there are issues such as water rights disputes between data centers and local residents, greenwashing misinformation from fossil fuel companies, and the ecological harms of mining to produce lithium-ion batteries, to name just a few examples.  

Funding at the intersection between climate justice and digital rights has been scarce in the past, but now, a new fund is looking to fill that gap. Supported by the Ford Foundation, the Internet Society Foundation, the Omidyar Group’s Luminate and the Mozilla Foundation, the Green Screen Catalyst Fund has announced grants to 15 recipients in support of projects including research on the climate impacts of the digital economy and tech infrastructure, creative storytelling and art projects to visualize technology's impacts on the environment, regional coalition and capacity-building for rising organizational leaders, and the development of sustainable technology, tools and infrastructure to measure and reduce environmental impact. 

The grants total almost $400,000. Grantees include Tech for Forests, the Environmental Coalition on Standards, Madhuri Karak, Esther Mwema, European Digital Rights, Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and Northern Ireland), Green Coding Solutions and Marie-Therese Png. 

After the completion of the grant cycle, which will last one year, the coalition hopes to engage in listening to understand what the grantee network needs. The Catalyst Fund may do more rounds of grantmaking, but it also hopes that other funders begin to explore the intersection of climate and digital rights. 

Launched last fall, the fund is part of a broader effort called the Green Screen Coalition, which came together when a group of grantmakers attended a digital rights conference in early 2022 and realized there weren't any funders working at the intersection of digital rights and climate justice. 

"Both [digital rights and climate]  are in crisis and have been for a long time," said Maya Richman, who co-leads the Green Screen Coalition. "They're both topics that are global in scope, really vast, and it's the kind of thing that the deeper you go into one, the more you realize you can never truly be an expert in it… There's so much complexity to these issues, so understanding them separately already is quite challenging."

Those initial funders, including Ford, Mozilla Foundation and Ariadne Network, commissioned a series of reports, including this one about challenges and opportunities in this space — and how tech funders can center climate and environmental justice in their work. This is the latest in a number of efforts Ford has been backing at the intersection of social justice and global digital inclusion and rights. They include the grantmaker’s Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience, as well as research into how the digitalization of the economy is impacting workers in the Global South.

Michael Brennan, senior program officer at Ford's Technology and Society program, said, "We've been seeding work at [the intersection of digital rights and climate justice] for a long time, and as we've kind of built that coalition, built that community, brought relationships together, helped people across these different kinds of movements meet, it became clear that there was an important role for a fund to help catalyze some of the relationships that were being built, which led us to the Green Screen Catalyst Fund.”

"A burgeoning field"

One of the Green Screen Catalyst Fund’s goals is to ensure that grantees represent people from around the globe, as well as different ways of organizing and working. 

"Since it's sort of a burgeoning field [and] there's a lot of new folks in this space, we wanted to make sure that… associations or organizations that aren't fully formed have an opportunity to kind of grow their approach and receive funding because some funders… just don't have the capacity or don't extend resources to groups that are younger and newer and maybe haven't yet established themselves," Richman said.

One such grantee is the Decolonial Feminist Coalition of Latin American Activists on Digital and Environmental Justice, which is made up of organizations, researchers and activists who work on critical approaches to digital technologies, taking particular consideration of the social and environmental impacts associated with them. 

The coalition is still in its early stages, having been established in June of last year. Its members include the Latin American Institute of Terraforming, which aims to "reflect critically on technologies in the context of climate and ecological crises faced in Latin America.” There’s also Coding Rights, a Brazilian organization that works to advance and defend human rights in the development, implementation and regulation of technologies, and Sursiendo, another of Green Screen Catalyst Fund's grantees. Based in southern Mexico, Sursiendo seeks to transform digital spaces into ones of autonomy and supports the creation of a world where development considers both socio-technical and natural environments. 

With its grant, the coalition is producing a web repository that will map the projects and initiatives taking place in Latin America that work at the intersection of digital and climate justice. 

"There's this belief that digital technologies [don't] have a social environmental impact," said Paz Peña, creator and coordinator of the Latin American Institute of Terraforming. "So for us, this is the first challenge now, to try to show people and especially to show people who are making decisions in the public sphere, that digital development has a social environmental cost."

The second challenge, Peña said, is that amid the climate crisis, there's been a big push for the digital transformation of economies as a way to transition to efficient energy. This push, however, often relies on extractive practices that directly and negatively impact places like Latin America. 

For example, the Latin American Institute of Terraforming's recent work involves looking at the effects of data centers in Chile. Large tech companies have built and are continuing to build data centers in the region. These centers, however, require millions of gallons of water every year for cooling, which has depleted water sources and greatly impacted the ability of local communities to access fresh water.   

Meanwhile, Coding Rights' work includes studying how the demand for metal and minerals has led to illegal mining in the Amazon. Joana Varon, who founded Coding Rights and goes by the title of “founder directress and creative chaos catalyst,” noted that climate justice involves more than just addressing carbon emissions.  

"It's the broader picture that we need to address," Varon said. "Addressing carbon is not going to solve the climate crisis. If Europe decides all cars are going to be electric cars by Tesla, that’s not a solution, because for the Tesla cars to run, they need to destroy our lands in Latin America to extract lithium to use in all the batteries.”

According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey’s mineral commodity summaries, a full 60% of all lithium is found in Latin America, concentrated particularly in the so-called Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.

The demand for lithium has skyrocketed in recent years due to the interest in renewable energy sources. Beyond being used to power electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries are also used in electronic devices like laptops, cell phones and tablets. Lithium mining, however, uses a lot of water, which has led to water stress, meaning there isn't enough water in a region to meet the demand. Lithium mining from salt brines in Latin America also risks contaminating local water sources, according to the World Economic Forum.

In addition, the Decolonial Feminist Coalition of Latin American Activists on Digital and Environmental Justice will conduct a series of interviews around some of the initiatives that it is mapping to show the international community the kinds of  perspectives and solutions that are coming from social movements, including Indigenous movements. 

"Here and… in other places of the world, we have other imaginaries, other cultures, other ways of socialization that are all impacted by some vision of tech that is being pushed toward us, Varon said, condemning the prevailing “monoculture” around “thought and of vision for [the] future.”

Catalyzing further giving

Seventy percent of the grants will support projects from “communities working in the Global Majority or collaborating deeply with partners from majority territories, where the impacts of the climate crisis are most pronounced,” according to a press release. The remaining 30% will largely go to recipients working in the E.U. and United States.

"With any technology issue, it's most important to work with and support the communities that are most affected by the harms of technologies," Brennan said. "But we also need to work in the places where regulation is most ready to be implemented or in the process of being implemented. So looking at EU and the European landscape, we see… a lot of tech regulation going on, and we think it's important to make sure we are also exploring the intersection of climate and digital rights in that geographic region, as well." 

The coalition hopes that the fund can catalyze more funding for this work, whether that's through more rounds from the Catalyst Fund itself or from other funders looking to get involved. One of the most important roles of the coalition and the fund, according to Richman, has been to bring grantmakers together to understand the problem so that they, in turn, can begin funding at the intersection between climate and digital rights. Richman encouraged interested funders to reach out to her.

"There's two things that mediate every aspect of our daily lives as people,” Brennan said. “One is technology and two is the climate crisis. And if we're not funding at that intersection, we are missing out on a really important area where things are changing very fast, and if we want to center equity and justice in that area, we need to be funding in that area."