Manifesto for a Just Cloud and Artificial Intelligence

There can be no meaningful democratic deliberation when information about water and energy consumption and sources, emissions, associated infrastructure, modifications, or expansion plans remains beyond public scrutiny or cannot be independently verified.

The impacts of digital infrastructure are not distributed equally. Communities that share water and energy sources, those engaged in local productive activities, and those who depend directly on ecosystems face different risks and costs from people who consume digital services hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.

Digital infrastructure can connect territories and generate benefits, but it can also deepen inequalities when decision-making power and benefits are concentrated among certain actors, while other territories provide water, electricity, minerals, land, and ecological capacity and bear a disproportionate share of the impacts. This expansion can reinforce extractivist models and the concentration of economic power, and become intertwined with authoritarian ways of imposing decisions on territories.

No territory is expendable in the name of digital expansion.

We reject the notion that companies proposing or developing projects should be the sole arbiters of which impacts must be assessed, how they should be measured, and what information is relevant to determining a project’s viability.

Communities know their territories. Their experiences and knowledge, including ancestral knowledge, make it possible to recognize changes in water, ecosystems, productive activities, and living conditions that are not always adequately reflected in technical studies. This knowledge also expresses the biocultural connections between territories, identities, and ways of life. Independent academic research helps us understand environmental, economic, social, and political processes. Defenders, journalists, and civil society organizations help uncover information, decisions, and power relations that often remain beyond public scrutiny.

Territorial and ancestral knowledge must engage in dialogue with academic, scientific, and journalistic knowledge under conditions of respect and mutual recognition. This exchange must respond to community priorities and strengthen communities’ autonomy to assess impacts, participate in decisions, and defend their territories.

We therefore defend independent research; public, timely, and understandable access to data; community-based monitoring; and the right of communities to obtain independent scientific, technical, legal, and environmental advice from advisers of their own choosing.

We affirm that life, community rights, and ecological limits must take precedence over digital expansion. No company has an automatic right to water, energy, land, or ecosystems.

We affirm that nothing should be decided about territories without their communities. Participation must begin in the earliest stages of projects, when genuine alternatives still exist, and before irreversible decisions about location or authorization are made. Participation must make it possible to modify, scale down, relocate, or stop a project.

We uphold the precautionary principle. Where significant risks exist or information is insufficient, governments and companies must demonstrate, before authorizing or constructing a project, that it can proceed without violating rights, causing significant environmental harm, or exceeding the ecological limits of territories.

We advocate comprehensive, territorial, and cumulative assessments. These must jointly consider existing, approved, and planned facilities; expansions; energy demand and water consumption; associated infrastructure; supply chains; and geographic concentration. They must also cover the entire life cycle of projects, from land preparation and transformation to construction, operation, expansion, decommissioning, and closure, considering direct, indirect, synergistic, and cumulative impacts.

We also reject the idea that efficiency or offsets justify unlimited growth. A facility may use fewer resources per operation while still being part of an expansion that increases total consumption of water, energy, minerals, and land. Efficiency must not become a license for limitless growth or a substitute for respect for rights and democratic oversight of decisions. We defend digital sufficiency: collectively debating which digital uses we need, who defines those needs, what resources we are willing to devote to them, and what scales are compatible with ecological and social limits.

We must also democratically debate the purposes for which natural resources and computing capacity are used, including data storage and processing and the training and operation of artificial intelligence systems. We reject presenting artificial intelligence as a universal solution to social, economic, and environmental problems or as the only possible path of technological development. Assessments of these infrastructures must consider how much they consume, what the resources are used for, who benefits, and who decides how they are used. Such uses must respect human rights, equality, and democracy, and meet collectively defined needs, while recognizing other ways of developing and using technologies.

In the face of the accelerated expansion of data centers and other digital infrastructure, we demand concrete actions to protect community rights, territories, and ecological limits:

• Moratoria and suspensions. Governments must suspend new data center permits, expansions, and construction until sufficient, publicly available, verifiable, and independent information demonstrates that projects are compatible with water and energy availability and the ecological and social limits of territories. This demonstration must be grounded in comprehensive and cumulative assessments of their impacts and in meaningful community participation processes with genuine influence over decisions. States must establish or adapt the legal and regulatory instruments needed to enforce these moratoria or suspensions. The absence of regulation, information, or adequate assessment cannot become permission to keep building.

• Priority for life and ecosystems. Access to water, energy stability and security, health, food security, communities’ essential activities, and ecosystem integrity must take precedence over new resource demands associated with digital expansion. Decisions about the location and scale of these infrastructures must respect the water, energy, ecological, and social limits of each territory.

• Specific and binding regulation. States must establish regulatory frameworks suited to the characteristics and impacts of data centers, with clear obligations regarding water and energy use, location, emissions, waste, associated infrastructure, transparency, participation, oversight, expansions, liability, and closure. These regulations must protect community rights and establish effective monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. Decisions cannot be left to the market or depend solely on companies’ voluntary commitments.

• Territorial, comprehensive, and cumulative assessment. Before approving new projects or expansions, authorities must determine how much infrastructure a watershed, city, electricity grid, or region can support, considering existing, approved, and planned facilities together. Assessments must cover the entire life cycle of projects and their associated infrastructure, from land preparation and construction to operation, expansions, closure, and decommissioning, considering their direct, indirect, synergistic, and cumulative impacts on territories and communities.

• Mandatory transparency and traceability. Project information must be public, accessible, understandable, up to date, and independently verifiable. The public must be able to consult permits and authorizations, environmental assessments, ownership and installed capacity, water sources and volumes, energy demand and sources, cooling systems, emissions, discharges and waste, associated infrastructure, modifications and expansions, and monitoring and inspection results.

• Early participation with genuine influence over decisions. Communities must participate from the earliest stages of projects, before final site selection and the granting of permits, while genuine alternatives still exist. Communities and defenders of rights and territories must have complete and understandable information, adequate timeframes, and access to independent technical and legal advice. Participation must make it possible to modify, scale down, relocate, or stop a project and cannot be limited to communicating decisions that have already been made.

• Priority for life and ecosystems. Access to water, energy stability and security, health, food security, communities’ essential activities, and ecosystem integrity must take precedence over new resource demands associated with digital expansion. Decisions about the location and scale of these infrastructures must respect the water, energy, ecological, and social limits of each territory.

• Effective accountability and limits on offsets. Companies and other actors that develop, finance, or benefit from these infrastructures must prevent and avoid their impacts and, where this is not possible, reduce and remedy them. Offsets should only be considered after effective prevention and reduction measures have been implemented and must never be used to legitimize projects incompatible with community rights or the ecological and social capacity of a territory.

Governments have a responsibility to protect the public interest and guarantee the rights of communities and defenders of human and environmental rights. We are concerned when technological infrastructure is promoted through incentives, regulatory concessions, or investment announcements before clear rules are established, impacts comprehensively assessed, and meaningful public participation ensured. Attracting investment cannot precede or replace these safeguards.

We are concerned that some public policies prioritize attracting data center projects or adapt regulatory frameworks to facilitate their installation without adequately assessing their environmental, social, and territorial consequences. We reject decisions of this magnitude being made without meaningful local participation, sufficient and verifiable information, or due consideration of the observations and decisions of affected communities and territorial institutions. Public policies on digital infrastructure must be grounded in independent evidence, transparency, democratic participation, and protection of the public interest.

We also demand accountability from technology companies and project developers. Global sustainability targets do not replace the obligation to disclose publicly and verifiably the concrete impacts of each facility on water, energy, ecosystems, and territories. Likewise, promises of jobs, investment, or innovation must be supported by verifiable information and publicly assessed alongside their environmental, social, and territorial costs.

Responsibility does not end with those who directly operate these infrastructures. Technology companies, developers, owners, mining companies, and other suppliers of materials and equipment, together with investors, banks, insurers, and other actors that finance, enable, or benefit from their expansion, must assume responsibilities proportionate to their involvement in projects and supply chains. They must exercise due diligence regarding the environmental, social, and territorial impacts of their activities, including those associated with mineral extraction, deforestation, and ecosystem degradation.

We do not reject technology. We reject its expansion when it is carried out in an authoritarian manner, without democratic oversight, and at the expense of communities, territories, and the planet.

We want digital infrastructure that is socially useful, transparent, democratically governed, respectful of rights, and compatible with the ecological and social limits of territories. We want to decide collectively which technologies and infrastructure we need, for what purposes, and at what scale; which justify the use of public and natural resources; which should change in scale or location; and which are simply incompatible with particular territories.

We defend the possibility of creating and sustaining small-scale, decentralized, community-based technologies defined and governed by the people who use them. We also recognize social and ancestral technologies and their biocultural value, which connects knowledge, identities, and ways of caring for and inhabiting territories. Technological futures must make room for this diversity and respond to community needs, without imposing continuous infrastructure growth or the adoption of artificial intelligence as inevitable destinies.

In the face of digital infrastructure that is often presented as inevitable, we affirm the right of communities and societies to participate in decisions about its development, scale, and location, from local and territorial levels to regional, national, and international levels.

The cloud is not in the air. It is in our rivers, our electricity systems, our soils, our minerals, and our territories.

We do not want to adapt life to the unlimited expansion of the cloud. We want digital infrastructure that recognizes its limits, respects rights, is accountable to communities, and serves life.