More than 80 civil society organisations, with supporters worldwide, outline 15 demands in a letter which offers practical pathways to align AI within planetary boundaries.
As world leaders and industry executives prepare for the AI Action Summit in Paris on Feb. 10 and 11, more than 80 civil society organisations call for them to urgently acknowledge the true environmental harms of AI. Groups that signed on to the letter span the issue areas of environmental and climate justice, human rights, open source technology and infrastructure, digital rights, feminist technology, such as Beyond Fossil Fuels, AI Now, Athena Coalition, European Digital Rights (EDRi), Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe, and La Quadrature du Net.
The statement sets out five categories of demands needed to reduce AI’s environmental harms across its entire supply chain and lifecycle. These include:
- Phase Out Fossil Fuels. The AI industry must urgently phase out fossil fuels across its entire supply chain.
- Computing Within Limits. AI computing infrastructure must urgently be brought within planetary limits.
- Responsible Supply Chains. AI companies with substantial marketshare and economic and political influence bear the primary responsibility to ensure a responsible supply chain.
- Equitable Participation. It is crucial to have public participation in decisions about what computation is used for and under what conditions. Climate and environmental activism must not be criminalised.
- Transparency. Transparency must be meaningful, and publicly accessible information about the social and environmental implications of proposed AI infrastructure and should be provided to the public before it is built or scaled.
The signatories reinforce the need to reject false and misleading solutions and instead offer practical pathways to align AI within planetary boundaries. These demands represent the bare minimum required to mitigate the ongoing harm to our economies, societies, and shared planet.
While recent news on the DeepSeek AI model has called into question large tech companies’ resource-intensive AI expansions strategies, such strategies are today the predominant approach to AI build-out and will continue to drain resources unless urgent action is taken.
“AI can never be a ‘climate solution’ if it runs on fossil fuels and is used to extract oil and gas. Its rising electricity demand is pushing power infrastructure to its limits, prolonging and intensifying our dependency on fossil fuels, which worsens climate impacts and undermines international commitments to limit global warming, says Jill McArdle, Beyond Fossil Fuels’ international corporate campaigner. “AI infrastructure like data centres must be powered by new and additional renewable energy that supports the wider energy transition.”
About the Green Screen Coalition for Digital Rights and Climate Justice
The Green Screen Climate Justice and Digital Rights Coalition is a group of funders and practitioners looking to build bridges across the digital rights and climate justice movements. The aim of the coalition is to be a catalyst in making visible the climate implications of technology by supporting emerging on-the-ground work, building networks, and embedding the issue as an area within philanthropy. https://greenscreen.network
The letter was organised by Green Screen Coalition for Digital Rights and Climate Justice and co-written by Green Web Foundation, Beyond Fossil Fuels, Aspiration, and critical infrastructure lab.