Presentation short abstract

Using the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Conservation Congress in 2025, I show how AI is reshaping power relations in global conservation governance: redefining what constitutes biodiversity, who has rights to it, and who makes money off of it.

Presentation long abstract

Neoliberalized governments face strong incentives to use innovative financial technology to meet ambitious global environmental targets like those in the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework. Technological innovations such as cloud computing, machine-learning, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) are increasing being used to identify and monitor species, surveil and redress the drivers of their loss, prioritize their conservation, and even predict the outcomes of global negotiations. In turn, investors are finding novel ways to digitize, commoditize, and financialize the related data, models, and results so as to generate new revenue streams. Drawing on data from the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, held in Colombia in October 2024, and the World Conservation Congress, held in United Arab Emirates in October 2025, I illustrate how actors—from conservation organizations to technology firms—are utilizing international conferences build alliances among traditional conservation actors and potential investors around the use of AI to monitor, conserve, and fundraise for biodiversity. These conferences provide platforms to showcase AI projects, debate the ethics of AI, and advance voluntary mechanisms to provide guardrails on its use. Many of these actors draw on narratives of urgency and innovation to justify eliding concerns about energy use and data sovereignty, as well as potential biases in generative AI used to predict conservation outcomes and prioritize conservation investments. Ultimately, I argue that AI is reshaping power relations in global biodiversity conservation governance: redefining what constitutes biodiversity, who has rights to it, and who makes money off of it.