Corporate Capture of the UN Summit of the Future

Corporate Capture of the UN Summit of the Future

(New York, 20 September 2024) The looming environmental dangers of massive deployment of digitalization and unleashing AI are being effectively ignored by the UN Summit of the Future taking place in New York on 22-23 September 2024 [1]. Giant technology companies are using the summit to position themselves as the tech saviours who will solve the world crises, with final versions of the text concealing the stark impact of their activities on the planet’s environment.

Even if it pretends to be anchoring a digital future in human rights, the Global Digital Compact text being negotiated at the Summit is now devoid of any effective reference to the environmental dangers of rampant digitalization. The message from the ETC Group team joining civil society events in New York and elsewhere is that the world cannot ignore that there’s no such thing as a free lunch in terms of our digital future!

As ETC Group’s recently published research shows [2], the pervasive use of digital devices in all sectors of life already has a huge impact on nature and human communities. All of our digital activity is stored in data centers, misleadingly called “clouds” which require a staggering amount of water supply and fossil fuel. For example, data shows that by 2027, the water removed from ground sources to power data centers is expected to reach between 4.2bn and 6.6bn cubic meters, or about half the amount consumed by the UK each year.