Digital Policy Rounds #2: Climate Justice, Media and Technology
by Prem Sylvester
Every problem that demands collective action and change today is, whether obvious or not, a problem inextricably tied up with climate change. Social justice, then, is a question of climate justice. The second edition of Digital Policy Rounds on Climate Justice, Media & Technology sought to foreground these questions in order to bridge the digital rights and climate justice movements. The extractive logics that have undergirded historical harms to land and people — such as through oil and gas production — can also be observed in data and AI industries. As moderator Sonja Solomun noted, calls for transparency, accountability, and attention to human rights protections — be it from large corporations or states such as Canada — resonate across these spaces.
The speakers, coming from a diversity of international contexts, sought to clarify these resonances. They emphasized thinking through a breadth of interrelated matters that speak to the persistence of historical structures, such as colonialism, and their contemporary material and political manifestations. For Anne Pasek, Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Media, Culture, and the Environment at Trent University, this is grounded in how we think about carbon and its uses and abuses. Thinking with carbon would nudge us to pay attention to the role carbon has played both as an organic material often located at the root of the climate crisis, as well as an abstraction employed in financial and policy instruments. This is especially consequential when metrics around carbon emissions are used as a “unit of equivalence” that, while useful in comparing dissimilar contexts, also elides the use of fossil fuels that grounds that metric. Our encounter with carbon through these metrics — without an emotional or social aspect tied to them — minimizes their political usefulness; part of the contemporary political task, then, is generating other ways to engage with the liveliness of carbon.
This task of fostering collective stories and political responses on the matter of climate change is complicated by the actions of state and private actors that constrain such meaning-making. The circulation of mis- and dis-information around climate change is, for example, made possible by the same tech platforms on which institutional, expert, and other alternative (including resistant) discourses circulate. Michael Khoo, Climate Disinformation Co-chair at Friends of the Earth pointed out that the prevalence of such campaigns was not accidental or incidental, but deliberately amplified by right-wing funders with significant reach online; the #climatescam trend on Twitter, for example, was auto-populated at the top of the search bar during COP27.
Notably, some of these groups that gain prominence through climate change denialism move between extremist discourses, such as turning to anti-masking and proliferating racist and misogynistic narratives. This may point to their being manufactured and honed in a minority group to then be rapidly amplified across scales. For example, discourses that linked power failures in Texas, USA to storm-damaged windmills quickly circulated online from fringe groups to the Governor of the state.
Similar climate obscurantism that is likely fueled by electorally-motivated political actors is also evident in Brazil. Carlos Milani, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the Rio de Janeiro State University’s Institute for Social and Political Studies argued that Bolsonaro-ism and its social, political, and religious conservatism persists “post-Bolsonaro”. National climate governance structures too, then, require to be fundamentally rethought; per the Talanoa Institute, 401 Acts passed by the Bolsonaro federal executive branch need to be rescinded for Brazil to have an effective climate action plan. The revitalization of institutional structures would have to function alongside international and regional efforts — such as the Amazon Fund and a Latin American coalition — in order for present and future efforts at climate justice to effectively redress the losses stemming from right-wing administration.
International and institutional efforts at addressing climate change do, however, need to reckon with histories of colonialism and extractive capitalism if climate justice is to truly benefit people around the world. An important, and per Nisreen Elsaim, Chair of the UN Secretary General Youth Advisory on Climate Change, underappreciated manifestation of these structures can be observed in the relationship between political instability and climate change. Platforms for international cooperation such as the COPs, for example, rely on governmental participation, which may be infeasible for politically fragmented countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia, and Syria, among others. Such instability also impacts attempts at managing technology interventions, such as knowledge transfers, that might be of some benefit.
International technology governance also introduces major barriers to these countries’ efforts at developing indigenous science and technology. There is a lack of funding for, and engagement with, ways to collect and develop situated knowledges to benefit particular communities therein, made worse by the fact that technology transfers to resource-strapped countries are constrained by private tech companies in, say, the US. Taking the example of the Loss and Damages Fund set up at COP 27 for countries especially vulnerable to climate change, Elsaim compared its goals to economically and politically powerful countries — especially those that have benefited from historical wrongs — having cut off a leg from the the former countries’ body politic and replacing it with a finger. Without ensuring that leading global emitters meet their targets and that historically disadvantaged countries and peoples have access to shared resources and socio-political equity with colonial and capitalist powers, laudable efforts such as the Fund are but temporary salves.
This problem of how we understand the challenges of climate change — including (neo)colonial practices — returns us to how we narrate them. Technologies of sensing and imaging, such as LIDAR, acoustic sensors, and satellites, play a significant role in the apprehension and managing of conservation efforts, such as of biodiversity in the tropics, Joycelyn Longdon, Founder of ClimateInColour and PhD student at University of Cambridge notes. However, these regions are precisely those that have felt some of the worst impacts of colonial extractive industries and regimes: impacts that continue to reverberate through questions of who gets to inform and actually build such technologies.
The different ways in which marginalized communities live with and use natural areas such as forests, then, need to be foregrounded in order to generate conservation efforts in a participatory mode. Inculcating such critical ways of knowing the planet we all live on is also what one might call climate literacy. Longdon approaches such work through an intersectional lens at the activist organization she founded, Climate in Colour, while Milani described efforts by youth climate activists in Brazil, such as circulating short artistic videos on WhatsApp, and capacity-building among social movements that are not explicitly about climate issues and justice. Human rights in this context are not about an abstract universalism but intersectionality and transversality between climate justice and labour, feminist and anti-racist, and Indigenous movements. Making such collective sense of the issues facing us locally and globally requires, in the first instance, the techno-political grounds on which such sensibility might emerge.
A key question of governance — of technology and climate justice — then becomes one of accountability: how can we keep companies and governments accountable to publics and environments. Per Khoo, part of this approach might come from simply emphasizing that technology platforms are products just like, say, airplanes, that require regulation, checks on their risks, industry-wide and/or public sharing of failure data, and importantly, their enforcement. Milani, however, offered a caveat that echoed Elsaim: where governments are weak, fail, or actively work against climate justice, civil society has a role to play in collecting and deploying information on climate action, even aiding in rebuilding State capacity. The point is not simply to develop governance systems for technologies in an overly broad sense, but to actively work to shape ‘innovation’ contextually, especially through its financing. This requires a turn away from quasi-universal models of climate justice and technological development that are separated from social and economic justice, indigenous knowledge, and (geo-)political action.
The politics of climate justice, then, circle around to how we think about climate justice: not as a wide-eyed endeavour that rests on techno-optimism and hopes for easy collective action, separate from the messiness of politics in general, but one that needs us to “change everything,” as Pasek put it, to put together a “coalition of coalitions”. It requires us to pay attention to what we consider ethical action and reciprocity, of what we owe to each other as countries and peoples, of how corporate responsibility for the climate crisis often remains elusive.
It is rooted as much — if not more — in how we narrate the abstractions of climate policy in locally meaningful ways as it is in international political communication. It reclaims the stories of our world from climate denialists that do not position climate policy qua climate but in gendered and racial resentment. It fosters a hopeful eye to the future that recognizes too the need for parameters of such hope, of thinking about climate repair. As Elsaim has emphatically stated, “you can’t govern a dead planet,” and so the task that falls to us all is how we build, support, and sustain communities and technologies that do not hasten that end.
This is a summary of the Digital Policy Rounds session hosted on December 15, 2022. This monthly series brings together broadly defined researchers, policy-makers and civil society voices to discuss interdisciplinary topics at the intersection of media, technology and democracy. Our objective is to expand beyond narrowly-defined "evidence-based" frameworks of policymaking to instead question what counts as evidence, and whose voices are included and amplified in public and policy debates about digital democracy.
This series is a partnership between
