Data and Society project announcement

ADM+S researchers to collaborate on Data and Society’s new Climate, Technology, and Justice Program

Author Data and Society 
Date 30 January 2025

Data & Society (D&S) today announced the launch of its Climate, Technology, and Justice program. Climate change is perhaps the most urgent social issue of our time and is only accelerating in importance. Already disproportionately impacting communities in the majority world, energy-intensive technologies like artificial intelligence only worsen the problem. Data & Society has spent a decade building an empirical research base on data-driven technologies, and fostering a network that is influencing how these technologies are studied and governed. The organization is uniquely well-positioned to examine the social and environmental repercussions of the expanded global infrastructures and labor practices needed to sustain the growth of digital technologies, from AI and blockchain to streaming and data storage.

The new program will be led by Tamara Kneese, who joined D&S in 2023 as senior researcher and project director of the Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab (AIMLab), and whose experience in human-centered technology and climate activism in the tech industry make her an ideal leader for this work. Joining her are two affiliates: Zane Griffin Talley Cooper, who studies data, resource extraction, and the Arctic; and Xiaowei R. Wang, whose body of multidisciplinary work, over the past 15 years, sits at the intersection of tech, digital media, art, and environmental justice.

Succeeding Kneese as AIMLab project director is D&S Senior Researcher Meg Young, whose leadership of the Lab’s participatory efforts and impact engagement since its 2023 launch have been key to its early successes. A champion for participatory methods in the AI impact space and for making technology more accountable to the public, Young’s work with communities across the country has positioned AIMLab for the future.

Before joining D&S, Kneese was lead researcher at Green Software Foundation (GSF), where she was part of the policy working group and the author of GSF’s first State of Green Software Report, which provided insight into the people and planet impacts of AI. Earlier, she was director of developer engagement on the green software team at Intel and assistant professor of media studies and director of gender and sexualities studies at the University of San Francisco. She and Young recently co-authored ”Carbon Emissions in the Tailpipe of Generative AI” in the Harvard Data Science Review, offering an overview of the current state of measuring, regulating, and mitigating AI’s environmental impacts and underscoring that the real existential threat posed by AI is its impact on climate.

“While this program will first tackle the environmental impacts of AI, we have expansive visions of how D&S’s considerable skillset can help us understand the complex relationships between climate, the environment, climate change, technology, and justice — areas like e-waste and tech reuse, algorithmic disaster prediction, and low-carbon tech adoption, centering the experiences and voices of the communities most affected,” said Alice E. Marwick, Data & Society’s director of research. “I am thrilled about the new body of scholarship that we will develop under Tamara’s leadership.”

“I am very excited to begin to build an empirical research base that will demonstrate the impact that AI and other data-driven technologies are having on the environment and on communities,” Kneese said. “Most importantly, we are doing this work in partnership with other researchers, academics, and grassroots groups who are essential to our vision of being able to investigate how data-driven technologies shape the environment, and how communities participate in or resist these processes.”

The program begins its research with two related projects. The first, conducted in partnership with researchers at the University of Virginia School of Data Science, is an assessment of the environmental and social impacts of AI, going beyond quantitative measurements of energy, carbon, and water costs to include the human rights impacts of data centers and energy infrastructures on communities. The second is an ethnographic and historical study of the practices of measurement, resistance, contestation, and refusal that emerge within and alongside the tech industry, focusing on sustainability practitioners, tech worker activist groups, and grassroots community organizations that organize across the digital value chain to mitigate the environmental and labor implications of data-driven technologies. Both projects involve participatory workshops that center the perspectives and needs of impacted communities to ensure that policymakers understand the full spectrum of environmental impacts related to computing and its global supply chains and underlying infrastructures.

These projects are supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2427700 and the Internet Society Foundation’s Greening the Internet program. Data & Society believes this type of work is most successful when done in partnership with others. In addition to UVA, other current research collaborators include the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, Athena Coalition, and Athena’s multi-state Data Center Working Group, in particular Green Web Foundation, Green Software Foundation, and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.

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