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“The question that was always asked of us: ‘You have such a big territory and if you get land rights, how are you going to manage that?’” recounted Andre Verhoogt, the Mulokot Foundation’s Managing Director. “The answer that the Indigenous would give and still give is: ‘We have been managing it for thousands of years.’”

Translating their ancestral guardianship in ways western governments or institutions could understand required new tools. This was the impetus for Guardian Connector: to co-create an open-source data integration and monitoring platform that positions Indigenous Peoples to collect, manage and own data about their territories on their own terms.

AI arrives as land, water and power.

Data centres are being built on and next to Indigenous lands. One AI data centre can draw 100 megawatts of electricity, as much as 100,000 homes use at the same time, and around 2 million litres of water a day for cooling. Worldwide, data centres are expected to use more than twice as much electricity in 2030 as they did in 2024.

They also need minerals. Of the world’s energy transition mineral projects, 54 percent are on or near the lands of Indigenous Peoples. AI is now being used to find new deposits as well.

On 10 September, six speakers took this apart from six different places.

On the islands of Malaita, Central, and Guadacanal, Indigenous Solomon Islanders have stewarded their lands and waters for thousands of years, holding their “Sky Aelans” sacred. Today, they are threatened by outsiders, who illegally cut and sell old-growth trees, cut away the protective mangroves, pump out gold from rivers, and build secret roads into the forests teeming with life. A collaboration among local and global groups has sprung up to blend traditional knowledge with cutting-edge tools and technologies to ensure the effective protection of these remarkable islands.

Climb above 400 meters in the Solomon Islands and the air changes. Clouds drift closer. Trees grow dense with moss, and the ridges carry an unmistakable weight of history. These are the Sky Aelans—sacred highlands that hold ancestral shrines, origin stories, and the cultural identity of the people who live nearby. Protecting them means safeguarding both biodiversity and culture.

While there is a wealth of spatial data and tools available to support forest protection, these resources often remain inaccessible to the communities that need them most. To bridge that gap, Conservation Metrics, along with UNDP, the Equator Initiative, NASA, Nature4Climate, Awana Digital, Rainforest Foundation US and Global Forest Watch, developed an online, self-paced certificate course to equip Indigenous and frontline communities with foundational knowledge and practical skills to map, monitor, and manage their forests.

Faced with mountains of image and audio data, researchers are turning to artificial intelligence to answer pressing ecological questions.

Acoustic monitoring combined with powerful machine learning is giving researchers new insights into the elusive Ashy Storm-Petrel. It’s just one way that artificial intelligence can tackle pressing conservation challenges.