This story is published through the Indigenous News Alliance.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is helping Indigenous communities detect illegal logging, track wildfires, and monitoring of traditional lands. But the data centers powering AI are driving new threats, requiring water, energy, and critical minerals often extracted from Indigenous territories. 

Now, Indigenous leaders at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII,  are wrestling with a paradox: how to harness AI’s protective capabilities without fueling the extractive forces they’ve resisted for generations.

A new study published by Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who is Mbororo and a former chair of the permanent forum, highlighted some of the possibilities and challenges AI presents for environmental protection, as well as the impacts of the technology on Indigenous territories. These include land-grabbing, water overexploitation and land degradation due to its high energy, water and critical mineral needs.

“For generations, Indigenous Peoples have protected the world’s most intact ecosystems without satellites, without algorithms or technologies,” Ibrahim told Mongabay. “AI can become a powerful ally to that stewardship, if it is used on our terms in a culturally appropriate way.”

Ibrahim explained that AI can help Indigenous communities monitor biodiversity, detect deforestation, illegal mining, wildfires or water contamination through the use of satellite imagery and sensors. “When combined with Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge, AI can help predict climate impacts, track wildlife movements, and strengthen land-use planning while helping to plan faster resilience strategies,” she added.

In the Katukina/Kaxinawá Indigenous Reserve in Brazil’s Acre state, Indigenous agroforestry agents have been using AI to combat deforestation. The reserve ranks among the top five for deforestation risk, according to a forecast from an artificial intelligence tool developed by Microsoft and the Brazilian nonprofit Imazon.

“It is very important to monitor the land because we Indigenous people are safer when we can detect if someone is invading, if someone is taking wood from our land, if someone is hunting directly on our land, if someone is putting up a fire close to our land,” Siã Shanenawa, one of 21 agroforestry agents in the reserve, said.

Lars Ailo Bongo, a professor at the UiT The Arctic University in Norway, leads the Sámi AI Lab, which investigates how AI can support Indigenous Sámi people. AI is not yet inclusive enough, he said in an email, but it does present some opportunities for communities. “AI can democratize access to the analytical capabilities needed to conduct data driven modelling aligned to Sámi views and norms,” he said. 

In Nunavut, Inuit communities are blending traditional knowledge with predictive AI models and time-series analyses to locate new fishing locations as climate change impacts the availability of fish. Similarly, in Chad, Indigenous pastoralists are combining participatory mapping and satellite data with predictive AI tools to anticipate severe droughts and secure transhumance corridors, boosting their climate resilience.

In South America, Rainforest Foundation US uses a combination of traditional knowledge and evolving technologies, from planting trees along boundary limits to smartphones and drones, to support Indigenous communities in protecting their territories.

“AI is the latest tool in that continuum,” Cameron Ellis, field science director at Rainforest Foundation US, said in an email. “Community monitors can use AI-derived remote sensing products to process large volumes of satellite data and interpret deforestation patterns linked to mining or agriculture expansion, to respond to those threats more quickly.”

Residents and farmers from Thailand’s Chonburi, and neighbouring Rayong province, which suffer from water shortages and pollution, have raised fears about the environmental impacts of data center expansion in the area – the digital infrastructure that powers AI. Data centers require large volumes of water for cooling and a large amount of energy to operate.  

The same scenario is playing out in many other communities around the world, from rural communities in eastern Pennsylvania, to villages in the state of Querétaro in north-central Mexico. Residents are worried about wastewater contamination, water and energy shortages and rising costs linked to the expansion of data centers in their towns.

“AI is often perceived as immaterial, but it carries a very real environmental footprint,” Ibrahim said. “It depends on vast amounts of energy, water, and critical minerals, many of which are extracted from or located near Indigenous Peoples’ territories, leading to land degradation, biodiversity loss and, in some cases, the displacement of communities.”

Beyond the environmental impacts of data centers, Ibrahim’s study also drew attention to other challenges for Indigenous peoples related to AI, such as a lack of infrastructure, legal protection and institutional capacity to safeguard digital rights. She wrote that AI can also lead to the exclusion of Indigenous peoples or facilitate the extraction of sensitive data. The use of drones, satellites or mapping tools without the prior consultation of Indigenous peoples, for instance, can expose the location of sacred sites, ecologically strategic areas or other sensitive areas.

Kate Finn is a citizen of the Osage Nation and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute, which works to align investor strategies with Indigenous rights. She describes what she calls “opportunity space” within AI to help Indigenous peoples preserve their languages and strengthen their governance systems. At the same time, she agrees with concerns about the environmental risks. “The consistent ask from Indigenous peoples around the world is that they want their free, prior, and informed consent respected before data centers go into their land.” she said. “As we approach AI from an Indigenous lens, it will necessarily have to take account of all of those different nodes, both the opportunity space, but also a protective space of lands, territories, and resources, and also of language and culture, and the creative property that Indigenous peoples have placed online.”

Bongo said the Sámi are limited by a lack of funding to hire the AI developers that can create Sámi-aligned AI models and to make these available to the community. “This is especially sad, since we have Sámi AI developers that are interested in doing the work,” he explained, meaning it is not a lack of competency, but capacity. “To make progress there is a need for a bigger center and push, that the Sámi organizations do not have the budgets for, so the states need to provide the funding [Norway, Finland, and Sweden].”

For projects that rely on outside funding, it’s also important that Indigenous peoples do not become a small minority partner, he said. 

“Technology on its own doesn’t protect forests – people do,” Ellis said. “These tools are only effective when grounded in community governance and leadership, and when the data they generate is used to trigger action on the ground. Likewise, communities must be able to retain sovereignty over how their data is collected to ensure it advances their own priorities without undermining their rights.” 

Ibrahim said that to ensure the protection of Indigenous peoples and their territories, governments must prevent all forms of land-grabbing, water exploitation and mining activities related to data centers and energy sources, and respect Indigenous rights, worldviews and aspirations.

“AI becomes harmful when it is imposed without free, prior, and informed consent,” Ibrahim said. “In that context, it risks repeating old patterns of extraction of the resource, data and appropriation of knowledge and the credit to these knowledge.”

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