LocationsThe impact of AI on Indigenous Peoples
From data subjects to digital sovereigns
August 8, 2025
Indigenous-led and collective movements have emerged in South America to give legal personhood to rivers.
Photo: UNDP Peru
This year, the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples focuses on the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) can have on Indigenous Peoples.
We reflect on how emerging digital technologies can align with Indigenous sovereignty, rights, values and futures, embodying data governance to catalyze collective and sustainability actions at a landscape or territorial scale.
For many Indigenous Peoples, data is embodied in lived realities, biocultural practices, and ancestral land memories.
Data sovereignty is profoundly intertwined with the custodianship of biocultural knowledge systems and relations embedded within Indigenous territories. As an Indigenous elder once reflected “our libraries are the landscapes we inhabit”.
At UNDP, we have been working on systems design and the use of digital public infrastructure (DPI) and technology for environmental actions at national and landscape scales.
DPI is an evolving concept of how public institutions can catalyze innovation by providing a trust-based digital infrastructure, similar to how a government provides physical infrastructure such as roads and bridges.
Image: UNDP
With our partners, we have envisioned a ‘Nature ID’ initiative as a national system of interoperable ‘layers’ to link data on biodiversity, environmental services, land tenure and indigenous rights.
Taking a DPI approach can help a country and its citizens structure data in a way that unlocks multiple sustainability objectives at once.
In Brazil, the Rural Environmental Registry (known as CAR) contains data on land ownership, compliance with the Forest Code, and other environmental regulations. The CAR is the base data layer for farmers to participate in agriculture credits, as well as payments for ecosystem services, such as watershed protection.
With the rapid implementation of AI in environmental actions, we observe the need for a system to map how trust flows through these digital payment schemes, including for emerging nature credit markets, as recently adopted by the EU.
In relation to genetic resources, traditional knowledge labels have notably been proposed to associate the provenance of Digital Sequence Information (DSI) in global databases with pre-existing territorial rights.
Establishing a Nature ID at an appropriate governance scale offers an opportunity to build a new digital infrastructure for Indigenous Peoples to steward their territories through trust, transparency, measurable results and benefits.
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, it is the duty of all Māori to protect their ancestors who continue to live on in the landscape. In 2017, after over 150 years of Indigenous struggle, the Whanganui River became the first river to be recognized as a legal person. Through a growing DPI at the national level, the Toha Network now channels digital payments to Indigenous Peoples for landscape restoration actions.
Similar Indigenous-led and collective movements have emerged in South America to give legal personhood to the Atrato River in Colombia in 2023, and Maranon River in Peru in 2024, catalyzing multi-actor partnerships for territorial well-being.
More governments are now considering a digital infrastructure to compensate land-owners and Indigenous Peoples for the protection of nature, climate mitigation actions, as well as for loss and damage resulting from disasters.
As the world continues to grapple with the full implications of AI, Indigenous Peoples and the Rights of Nature may continue to find common cause.