The Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights Catalyst Fund

Research Question

1. How do climate justice and digital rights movements envision sustainable and equitable internet infrastructures and how can they best influence internet governance spaces?

Why Is This Research Important?

The climate crisis poses an increasing threat to life on Earth, with the internet and digital technologies exacerbating systemic inequalities and environmental degradation. Sustainable solutions often focus narrowly on energy consumption and efficiency of protocols, overlooking broader harms and not looking at the consequences of the infrastructure. Integrating climate and environmental justice into internet governance can shift actions towards more equitable infrastructure. The Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights Catalyst Fund aims to support emerging work that merges the needs of climate justice and internet infrastructure communities, fostering collaborative, multidisciplinary investigations to influence dominant discourses and practices. 

Methodology

The Green Screen Catalyst Fund will act as a catalyst to strengthen individuals’, organisations’, and the network of emerging leaders’ capacity to engage on the specific issues related to climate justice and the internet. We will do this in a number of ways. Through the small grants mechanism, the project will fund the climate justice and digital rights community to engage in research and test out initial ideas on the nexus of climate justice and the internet. Grantees of the Fund will determine specific methodologies, emphasizing decolonizing and intersectional approaches. 

The fund will also facilitate capacity building, strategy development, and dissemination of findings through travel and participation in internet governance spaces. The project will include regional and contextual diversity, co-design open calls, and integrate feedback from community members to ensure thoughtful decision-making and effective outreach. This approach aims to democratize research and influence policy and industry practices. 

Media and Publications

• Undersea cables in Africa: The new frontiers of digital colonialism Examines how current undersea cable projects and Internet infrastructure, owned, controlled, and managed by private Western big tech corporation, often using the “bridging the Digital Divide” rhetoric, not only replicates colonial logic but also follows the same infrastructural path laid during the trans-Atlantic slave trade era. 
• Fictions and Frictions- Identifying bridges, tensions and possible coalitions towards environmental justice and digital rights Explores different manifestations of climate and digital rights issues in Latin America and Europe.
• Harnessing AI for environmental justice Unpacks the challenges and opportunities that face both larger organisations and those with more limited means to suggest a number of principles that can inform and guide responsible AI practices. 
• Semiconductors: A Field Guide Looks at the long legacy of electronics, specifically chips manufacturing in a trans-Pacific geography – across East Asia and Silicon Valley since the 1960s.