Observatory of Planetary Justice Impacts of AI
2025-2026 Report
The Observatory is one of our core initiatives, tracking the planetary justice impacts of AI across the supply chain. We collect reports, news, and academic research that reports on those impacts, and create a collective repository organised by region, issue, and stage of the AI supply chain. This is a bottom-up research initiative, aimed at collecting case studies from a variety of sources, and aimed at being collaborative. The purpose of the initiative is to make visible the impacts that might be overlooked in AI discourses focused only on model deployment, and to provide a repository of case studies for future research.
We launched the Observatory in May 2025. This year 1 report functions as an opportunity for us to review the work we’ve done so far, the case studies that we have collected, which impacts of the AI supply chain have emerged broadly, and whether our categories serve our purposes of collecting a useful repository of case studies. We also examine the limitations of our research and any biases that have emerged, in order to work to redress those limitations and biases going forward.
Executive Summary
In this report, we examine the data we have collected over one year of running the Observatory of Planetary Justice Impacts of AI. Our aim is to collect impacts reported by researchers and communities along the AI supply chain. We analyse those impacts by which stage of the supply chain they take place in, whether those impacts are currently felt or projected for proposed projects, any regional disparities across the planet, and whether resistance is present in each case. We observe the unequal distribution of impacts across plural communities, and we examine the biases present in media reporting on this issue as well as our own research biases (based on language and location) to redress.
Data & Figures
These are examples of some of the data included in the final report, as a preview.
Regional Disparities
We have tracked where the impacts have been felt in the cases reported. Some cases occur across borders, or mention more than one country, in which case they have been included once for ease of visualisation. Below is a map view of the case studies encountered. If you open the sidebar on the left, you can filter by stage of the AI supply chain.
Issues Detected
The core part of our project is to track the impacts felt by communities and linked to the AI supply chain. As discussed in the methodology section, our categories of issues have evolved over time. Please refer to that section for the relevant definitions.
This is the split of issues we have encountered in our dataset.
We welcome feedback from other researchers and are open to collaboration on this dataset to take this project forward in new and innovative ways. Please find contact details in the PDF download.
Contribute to the Observatory
We aim for the Observatory to be a collective, bottom-up research effort. Anyone can submit cases of planetary justice impacts of AI. We value your contribution, and invited you to send us your submissions through the form below.