The next frontier of environmental sustainability is not only in forests, oceans, or energy grids. It is in the integrity of the digital systems that tell us what is burning, flooding, shifting, and at risk.

 

A corrupted weather alert can be as dangerous as a polluted river.

 

That is precisely why, at the Global AI Center POLLYPRIANY, one of our three institutes — the AI Institute on Digital Economy and Eco-Cyber Security — focuses on the nexus between environmental protection and digital integrity.

 

If people cannot trust the weather alert, the distress signal, the evacuation notice, the accessibility channel, or the protection-related platform communication, then sustainability

is no longer resilient.

It is fragile.

 

And this is exactly where Artificial Intelligence enters the picture. AI is already being used to forecast climate hazards, detect environmental anomalies, optimize emergency response, map displacement risks, and process enormous volumes of data far faster than any human system can. That capacity is powerful. But if AI is deployed without legal safeguards, transparency, accessibility, and human oversight, then the same technology that could strengthen resilience can also magnify harm, confusion, exclusion, and vulnerability.

 

That is why the one priority action for implementing the Global Digital Compact in the next one to two years should be this:

legally protect the environmental and humanitarian information space as a trusted public commons, and regulate it upstream.

 

Through our work at the Global AI Center POLLYPRIANY, we have developed

the concept of Eco-Cyber Security —

a framework that unites the protection of the living sphere — ecosystems, nature, non-human life — with the protection of the information sphere on which safety, dignity, mobility, and environmental survival increasingly depend.

 

In our contribution to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, we argued that “truth channels” — weather alerts, distress signals, route information, and other life-relevant communications — must not be fabricated, suppressed, deceptively ranked, or digitally corrupted. This is not a niche concern. It is an emerging condition of lawful sustainability governance.

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Who should lead?

States must lead by codifying these duties into law and public governance. Yet real implementation must be co-led with UN actors, digital platforms, civil society, and independent oversight institutions.

 

That is also why I would say: if we are asking who should lead and how this should be done, then we should also look seriously at the

Artificial Intelligence Constitution.

 

Many of the answers are already there in its pages — as a practical legal compass for governing AI, protecting dignity, and embedding accountability into the implementation of the Global Digital Compact.

 

Because in this century, to protect the environment, we must also protect the truth-bearing systems through which people navigate environmental danger. And if we get that right, we will not merely make sustainability digital — we will make it governable, enforceable, and human-centred.