Water is a fundamental human right, but the industry claiming to “feed the world” is quietly poisoning what we drink.

From rural Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Denmark, an invisible health crisis flows through our taps: nitrate contamination. For decades, industrial meat and dairy, Big Ag, has treated our rivers and groundwater as a free sewer for its waste. Now scientists are sounding the alarm, with major studies showing the link between industrial runoff and chronic illness. Yet, while the evidence is mounting, our laws remain stuck in the past. 

How Big Ag turns our groundwater toxic

Nitrates in drinking water primarily come from the massive overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and the staggering volume of urine and manure from industrialised livestock production.

The industry routinely applies far more nitrogen to fields than grass or crops can actually absorb. This excess doesn’t just disappear. It leaches deep into the earth and into our water. 

Agribusiness lobbyists want us to believe they can go on polluting and hope that technology will be able to clean up their mess. But science tells us something else: filtering these toxins is a false, expensive solution. The root cause of this crisis is the sheer, unsustainable volume of animals on the land.

For over 60 years, the global guideline for nitrates in drinking water has been 50 milligrams per litre (mg/L) of nitrate (NO₃), a standard set in the 1950s. But scientists are today warning that this limit is hopelessly out of date. 

The evidence is being noticed. Building on a massive cohort study of 2.7 million people that first identified increased bowel cancer risks at just 3.87 mg/L NO₃, the Danish authorities have been forced to act. Following a 2024 study that attributed roughly 127 annual bowel cancer cases in Denmark directly to nitrate pollution, the momentum for reform became unstoppable. By 2025, an international expert group commissioned by the Ministry of Environment officially recommended a new, health-based standard of 6 mg/L. This official recognition marks the end of the era of denial. Science is no longer just ‘on the horizon’, it is now the roadmap for protecting public health.

The true cost of agricultural pollution

Corporate meat and dairy industries generate record profits by pushing ecosystems to the brink, but they don’t pay for the mess they leave behind. We pay with our health, our children’s safety, and our taxes.

The direct and indirect health costs linked to colorectal cancer and drinking water nitrate in Denmark are estimated at over US $317 million annually. Filtering these toxins is a technical and financial nightmare.

In Denmark, the city of Aalborg is a warning to the world as the local utility is now suing the state for 1.1 billion DKK (US $160 million) to build the filtration plants they say are required to fix Big Ag’s mess. The city argues it shouldn’t be the responsibility of everyday taxpayers to foot this massive bill. Far from cleaning up their act, the industry is doubling down. While communities struggle to pay for clean water, Big Ag ‘bosses’ are plotting a global surge.

In Nigeria, the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS, has signed a US $2.5 billion deal to build six massive factory farm complexes. They are exporting a failed, toxic model to new frontiers, ensuring that a new generation of families will be stuck paying the price for corporate profit.

This is the classic Big Ag playbook: Keep the profits, leave the costs to everyday families.

Together for science: The path to safe water

We need a transformation of our food system, and we are finally seeing cracks in Big Ag’s armour. But this change is being driven by communities rising up to protect their homes, it’s not just being handed to us by courts or politicians. 

And it isn’t just happening in Denmark. We are seeing a global wave of resistance against Big Ag’s toxic legacy. 

In Spain, a landmark 2026 Supreme Court ruling recently confirmed that authorities violated the fundamental human rights of citizens by failing to control industrial livestock pollution in the Galicia region. This follows successful local moratoriums in regions like Castilla-La Mancha, where communities have fought to halt the march of ‘macro-farms’ that threaten their wells and their futures. 

In a historic first for New Zealand, the regional council for Canterbury (ECan) officially declared a ‘Nitrate Emergency’ in September 2025, acknowledging that current land use has pushed drinking water to a breaking point. 

From the Mediterranean to the South Pacific, the conversation is shifting from ‘how much can we pollute?’ to ‘how do we restore our right to clean water?’ The Danish discussion about converting high-risk agricultural land back into nature is just the next logical step in this global movement to prioritise public health over corporate expansion.

Stop Big Meat and Dairy

It’s time to cut through corporate lies, cut agriculture emissions and shift towards sustainable agroecology.

Sign now!

We cannot wait for the agribusiness lobby to prioritise our health over their profits – they never will. We need our political representatives to move beyond the failed standards of the past and adopt a precautionary approach to safeguarding our water. Join us in calling for:

• Independent Health Assessments: A comprehensive review of our national nitrate limits, using the 6 mg/L health-based benchmark as the new gold standard for community safety.
  
• Vulnerability Mapping: Immediate protection for communities in high-intensity livestock areas, ensuring that ‘Hotspot’ aquifers are managed with the highest level of caution.
  
• A Transition Fund: Support for farmers to phase out synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and shift toward a food system that restores our land instead of draining its future.

Science isn’t just something done in a lab; it is a tool for community resistance, and together, we can close the gap between the law and the science. It’s time to choose people’s health over corporate profits.

Amanda Larsson is the Food and Agriculture Global Campaign Lead at Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Barcelona, Spain – Greenpeace has today announced that its ship, the Arctic Sunrise, will join the upcoming Global Sumud Flotilla. Sailing alongside more than seventy vessels and over a thousand participants who seek to directly challenge Israel’s ongoing blockade of aid to Gaza. The Arctic Sunrise’s role is to provide technical and operational maritime support so that the vessels safely transit across the Mediterranean before they complete the last 200 nautical miles onto Gaza’s shores. 

Eva Saldaña, Executive Director of Greenpeace Spain, said, “At this time of escalating war, triggered by US and Israeli militaries and cascading into a cycle of destruction and pain across the Middle East, we are honoured to answer the call to join the Sumud Flotilla with the Greenpeace ship, the Arctic Sunrise.

“While world governments have lacked the courage and conviction to uphold international law and their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza, the Sumud Flotilla has been a shining light of humanitarian solidarity and a symbol of hope in action.”

In response to a direct call from Palestinians in Gaza, the flotilla is set to sail from Barcelona, Spain, on April 12, 2026, with stops in Syracuse, Italy, and Lerapetra, Greece, en route to Gaza. A public solidarity gathering will be held on Saturday 11th.

Ghiwa Nakat, Executive Director of Greenpeace MENA, said, “The devastation inflicted on Gaza has become a dangerous doctrine of impunity, now spreading to Lebanon through relentless destruction and deepening human suffering. The Greenpeace ship is joining this people-led mission to demand safe, unhindered humanitarian access to Gaza and to challenge the illegal blockade that continues to devastate civilian life. We stand firmly against war crimes, deliberate starvation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and ecocide. This flotilla is a call to governments around the world to end their silence, protect humanitarian action, and act with urgency and principle to uphold international law, human dignity, and justice.”

Susan Abdullah, Global Sumud Flotilla Steering Committee member, said, “Greenpeace’s history of defending the seas, confronting injustice and taking action in defence of life makes them a powerful addition to our 2026 spring mission. We sail together in the same direction, with a shared determination to help break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza.”

The Sumud Flotilla last sailed in September 2025 with 42 boats and 462 people. Israeli forces illegally intercepted and forcibly boarded the flotilla, taking those on board into custody and transporting them to Israel. Israeli naval forces first boarded several flotilla boats about 70 nautical miles off the Gaza coast, cutting communications and jamming signals. Crew on the boats described tense encounters with unlit boats and drones shadowing the flotilla and reported that Israeli naval vessels had damaged their communications, disrupting distress signals and livestreams of the boarding.

The MY Arctic Sunrise has been part of the Greenpeace fleet since 1995 and has been on the front line of global campaigns from the Antarctic to the Arctic. Carrying up to 30 people, it is a 50.5-metre (166 ft) ice-classed vessel with a maximum speed of 13 knots (24 km/h; 15 mph). 

Greenpeace has long condemned both the humanitarian and environmental crises caused by Israel’s genocide on Gaza. Our demands can be found here.  

ENDS

Photo and video from the Greenpeace ship will be regularly updated in the Greenpeace Media Library. 

For more information on the Global Sumud Flotilla: https://globalsumudflotilla.org/press/

Spokespeople will be available for interviews before and after departure from Barcelona.

Contact:

Diederick van den Ende, Communication Lead at Greenpeace Netherlands (on board), dvdende@greenpeace.org 

Greenpeace International Press Desk, pressdesk.int@greenpeace.org, +31 20 718 2470 (24 hours)

Global Sumud Flotilla, media@globalsumudflotilla.org, +44 1414 620 950

The environmental impact of AI is becoming harder to ignore, from soaring energy use and water consumption to the rapid expansion of data centres and microchip production. What is being built in the name of innovation is also concentrating power, intensifying surveillance and deepening democratic risk.

The environmental impact of AI: energy, water and emissions

The AI boom is being sold as inevitable progress, but the real question is not whether artificial intelligence can do useful things in theory. It is who owns it, who profits from it, what it is mostly being used for, and who pays the environmental and political bill when the hype turns into microchip manufacturing plants, data centres, rising power demand, water stress, surveillance and attacks on democratic life. 

A Greenpeace Germany report released in 2025 warned that AI’s electricity demand, emissions, water use and raw material needs are all rising fast, and that AI data centre electricity demand could be 11 times higher in 2030 than in 2023 unless governments intervene. A February 2026 report backed by Beyond Fossil Fuels made the greenwashing problem even clearer, finding that 74% of industry claims about AI’s climate benefits were unproven and that it could not identify a single case where consumer generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot were delivering material, verifiable and substantial emissions cuts.

This matters because it punctures one of the sector’s favourite talking points, namely that energy-hungry generative AI can be excused by vague future climate benefits. In reality, the buildout itself is locking in more extraction, more infrastructure and more corporate power, while the largest firms try to present that expansion as climate leadership. 

That is why the debate cannot be reduced to whether AI might do good one day, because the system being built right now is already redistributing power upwards while pushing environmental costs and information risks outwards.

AI data centres and why communities are pushing back

Across different countries, people are fighting data centres not because they are anti-technology, but because they recognise the pattern: land grabbing, noise pollution, pressure on water systems, strain on local grids and the steady erosion of community control over land and infrastructure. In New Brunswick, New Jersey, city leaders removed data centres from a redevelopment plan after public backlash and restored a park requirement, while residents and campaigners explicitly raised concerns about environmental harm, energy consumption, water use and noise pollution. In San Marcos, Texas, the city council voted 5-2 to block a proposed data centre after an hours-long meeting and more than 100 public comments.

In September 2025, South Dublin County Council in Ireland passed a motion calling for a nationwide ban or moratorium on new data centres, or strict conditions including 100% renewables, amid concern that communities are being forced to absorb the economic and ecological costs of someone else’s digital expansion. In the UK, campaigners won permission for a legal challenge against a 90MW hyperscale data centre in Buckinghamshire after the government admitted it had made a “serious error” in approving the scheme.

South Africa shows the growing disconnect between the push for AI infrastructure and the ecological realities of water stress and climate disruption. Australia, meanwhile, shows how rapidly this model is being scaled up globally, with the world’s second-biggest data centre buildout after the United States.

These are not fringe skirmishes. They are early signs of a broader democratic backlash against a model of digital expansion that expects local communities to absorb the costs while distant corporations and billionaires bank the gains.

Resistance is also becoming cultural, not just local. The QuitGPT boycott has gained traction as a symbolic rejection of the idea that ChatGPT should become the default interface for work, knowledge and everyday life. The movement is explicitly a reaction to OpenAI’s deal with the US Department of Defense, and it took on added urgency as the US and Israel began bombing Iran almost immediately afterwards. Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman has helped amplify it by urging people to cancel their subscriptions, first pointing to more than 700,000 supporters, then more than one million. More than 2.5 million users are now boycotting ChatGPT. 

The opposition to OpenAI and ChatGPT is no longer confined to specialists but is reaching writers, organisers, educators and mainstream audiences who are starting to question what exactly they are being asked to normalise.

Big Tech, AI power and the threat to democracy

If you want to understand why campaigners are increasingly focusing on chips as well as chatbots, start with Nvidia, the American chipmaking giant, and its CEO, Jensen Huang. Nvidia announced a staggering annual revenue of US$ 215.9 billion, underscoring just how central the company has become to the global AI boom. Recent earnings show Nvidia’s business is now dominated by data centres and AI chips, not gaming, with roughly 80% to 90% of revenue coming from data centres while gaming has fallen below 10%. 

Huang has framed AI as “the largest infrastructure build-out in human history” and as foundational infrastructure for the modern world, which is precisely why Nvidia cannot be treated as a passive supplier standing outside the social and ecological consequences of the boom. Without Nvidia’s chips, much of the present generative AI race simply would not happen at its current scale.

Greenpeace East Asia’s October 2025 findings rank Nvidia last on AI supply-chain decarbonisation and argue that the company’s record revenues are being built on a “decarbonisation deficit” outsourced to suppliers in Taiwan and South Korea that still depend heavily on fossil power. 

Greenpeace East Asia’s reporting also highlighted a 4.5-fold increase in emissions from AI chip manufacturing in a single year, showing how quickly the environmental cost of this infrastructure race is escalating. This is not a side effect of the boom. It is part of the industrial model that underpins OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon and the wider rush to scale generative AI as fast as possible.

Amazon tells a similar story. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon made more than US$ 77 billion in profits in 2025 while cutting around 30,000 workers as it ramped up AI spending. This is what “innovation” looks like when it is steered by monopoly power: record profits, job cuts, rising capital expenditure and a false promise that more automation will somehow trickle down into public good.

AI, war and manipulation

The political economy of the AI boom should worry anyone who cares about democracy and civil liberties. Tech leaders and companies spent heavily to curry favour with Donald Trump after his reelection, including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman’s US$ 1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund, while reporting also tied OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to a US$ 102 million Trump war chest drive. 

Palantir and Alex Karp have gone further into the architecture of state power. ICE agreed to pay Palantir $30m to build its “ImmigrationOS” surveillance platform, while Karp defended the company’s work with ICE and later said critics of ICE should be protesting for “more Palantir”, not less. That tells you a great deal about what counts as “progress” when AI, border violence, data extraction and executive power converge.

The debate over AI and war has become sharper too. Anthropic reportedly sought explicit contractual prohibitions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, and has been in conflict with the Pentagon over refusing to broaden those terms, while OpenAI struck a Pentagon deal for classified systems and revised it only after backlash, adding stronger restrictions against domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons without human oversight. That does not make Anthropic harmless, but it does show that even inside this industry there are real fault lines over how far companies are willing to go in militarisation and state surveillance.

Amnesty International has called for bans on AI-based practices including public facial recognition, predictive policing, biometric categorisation, emotion recognition and migrant profiling, while Forbidden Stories has investigated firms pitching AI-enabled surveillance tools that can target journalists, dissidents and activists.

Culture and information are being reshaped at speed as well. Deezer says it is now receiving more than 60,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day, roughly 39% of all music delivered to the platform daily. Six of Spotify’s top 50 trending songs in the US in late January were fully AI-generated. Suno was generating 7 million songs a day. Suno chief executive Mikey Shulman gave the game away when he said: “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice”, reducing musical craft to a friction problem for software to remove. Sam Altman’s remark that it takes “20 years of life and all of the food you eat” to “train a human” landed for the same reason, because it exposed a worldview in which human creativity and ecological limits are treated less as values than as inefficiencies.

The biggest AI companies have not just disrupted creative industries, they have been repeatedly accused in court of building their products on unlicensed human work, with lawsuits from authors and visual artists, from major news organisations including The New York Times, and from Hollywood studios such as Disney and Universal alleging large-scale copyright infringement. Whether every case succeeds or not, the pattern is clear: companies that present themselves as engines of innovation have been credibly accused of treating books, journalism, music and art as raw material to be scraped, absorbed and monetised without consent, compensation or democratic accountability.

The same systems are also corroding the information environment. Research from Proof News found that leading AI tools gave inaccurate, harmful or incomplete answers to basic election questions more than half the time, while a separate GroundTruthAI analysis reported by NBC found that popular chatbots answered election queries incorrectly 27% of the time. 

Grok on X has already shown how this can play out in practice. Election officials traced false claims about ballot deadlines and candidate eligibility back to Grok during the 2024 US race, and later warned that such errors could mislead or confuse voters at scale. With more high-stakes elections approaching, that is not a marginal bug. It is a democratic risk amplified by billionaire-owned platforms, automated recommendation systems and synthetic content designed for maximum engagement rather than truth.

Technology for the common good: democratic control, privacy and renewable energy

A different future is possible.

Technology for the common good would mean a society where digital tools are built first to meet real social and ecological needs, not to deepen billionaire control or chase speculative profit, and where AI is not treated as an automatic solution but used only when it is appropriate, justified and not more resource-intensive than simpler alternatives.

It would run on 100% additional renewable energy, disclose its full energy, water and supply-chain footprint, and be designed so communities are not left paying the price through higher bills, water stress or pollution.

Ownership and governance would be far more democratic, with strong public rules, limits on monopoly power, meaningful community consent, and institutions able to steer technology towards climate resilience, public services, biodiversity protection and other shared needs. It would also mean building forms of sovereign AI, where data and models are not simply extracted into distant corporate clouds but remain subject to local democratic control, clear auditability, strict privacy safeguards and public-interest rules. Access would be broad, affordable and accessible by design, and the freedoms it protects would include privacy, freedom of expression, the right to dissent, and protection from surveillance, manipulation and exclusion, so that technology expands people’s power instead of shrinking it.

Fight the billionaire takeover

Take action to fight the billionaire takeover and corporate intimidation.

Take action

Unseen images from Greenpeace’s ship tour are available here showing at-risk sharks being caught, illustrating the need for stronger protection – as ‘RMFOs’ make a power grab on the Global Ocean Treaty

New York, USA, 2 April 2026 – Fishing industry representatives make up to a third of national delegations to key fishing management meetings, with one almost reaching 45% in 2021, a new Greenpeace International investigation reveals. This comes as the future of ocean protection came under attack from a power-grab by fishing industry vested interests at key UN ocean talks.

This news raises concerns of a “rigged system” where the vested interests of industrial fishing trump ocean protection measures, but this cannot be allowed to bleed into the application of the Ocean Treaty which came into force in January, campaigners say.

Lukas Meus, Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe ocean campaigner, said: “It’s outrageous to see just how deeply the fishing industry is embedded within the very organisations that are meant to regulate and manage fishing. At present, the foxes are guarding the henhouse – the system is rigged against ocean protection. 

“The fishing industry has been allowed to set the rules of the game for decades. Governments must now stop caving in to industry pressure and stop allowing vested interests to win out over ocean conservation. 

“We now have the historic opportunity with the Global Ocean Treaty to cordon off big areas of the ocean to allow it to recover – we can’t let the effects of decades of lobbying interfere with this. That’s why we’re calling for a time limit on the organisations that manage fishing to input to sanctuary proposals, this would prevent vested interests stalling ocean protection and tying it up in delays.”

Greenpeace is calling for urgent measures to be put in place ahead of the first Ocean COP in January 2027 to ensure it isn’t tainted by industry lobbying:

• Impose a maximum 120 day time limit for the review of sanctuary proposals to prevent Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs) and fishing industry interests, from stalling the process. RMFOs have always protected the interests of the fishing industry, overseen the decimation of biodiversity and destruction of entire ecosystems, and must not be allowed to tie up ocean protection in delays. 
• Rigorous monitoring of participation, with specific focus on national delegation composition and associated scientific advisory processes. This is necessary to identify and mitigate the “embedding” of commercial actors.
• Implement mandatory disclosure of all delegation affiliations, including a clear register of “technical advisors”. Transparency must extend to all observer participation and advisory committee roles to ensure that scientific recommendations remain independent from corporate influence.

Governments have committed to protecting 30% of the ocean in the next four years, a target that scientists say is the absolute minimum required for the ocean to bounce back from decades of destruction. Making sure that the process of creating sanctuaries isn’t tied up in delays will be vital to this progress.

ENDS

Notes to editors

[1] Link to report: Corporate Influence on High Seas Fisheries Management

[2] Greenpeace International press release: Governments must curb corporate interference in the Global Ocean Treaty at key talks 

[3] Recent unseen images from the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise can be found in the Greenpeace Media Library here. Greenpeace crew witnessed what the result of years of poor RFMO management looks like in the Convergence Zone, an area hotly tipped to be among the first MPA proposals under the Treaty. There are not sufficient safeguards that protect endangered sharks under current rules.  

• The report focused on eight major organisations governing high seas fisheries and their meetings over the last 5 years: The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT), the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), the North Pacific Fisheries Commission (NPFC), and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO). 
• Fishing industry representatives include delegates whose primary affiliation is with fleet operators, vessel owner groups, distant-water fishing corporations, seafood processors, tuna companies, national fishing associations, producer organisations, trade bodies, or gear suppliers. 
• The shadowy organisations that govern fishing on the high seas, called Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs), are mainly made up of government representatives with vested interests in commercial fishing. The research focused on eight of these organisations’ key global meetings over the last five years and found that industry makes up on average 28–29% of total delegations. While some commissions cluster around 23–27% and others reach up to 30–35%, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission even hit 44.2% in 2021.
• By participating inside governments’ delegation structures and technical committees, RMFOs have unbridled access to negotiations and processes that actively shape conservation outcomes. Industry-aligned delegations regularly deploy tactics to delay and narrow conservation measures that could restrict the agenda of the fishing industry. It is in the best interest of the fishing industry that RFMOs retain their power over the high seas’ RMFOs routinely push narratives to undermine the need for high seas sanctuaries that would cordon off areas of the ocean from the fishing industry’s destructive activity.
• The report highlights a particularly egregious example with the EU at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT): 35–39% of the EU delegation consisted of fishing industry representatives each year. The EU consistently had the highest number of industry representatives of any participant at these meetings, and in all five years assessed, the number of industry representatives exceeded the entire delegation size of any individual non-EU country, meaning that industry outweighed any government representatives. 
• Across the dataset, the delegations embedding the highest numbers of industry-affiliated delegates are consistently major fishing powers. The EU most frequently contributes the largest number of industry representatives across multiple RFMOs, particularly ICCAT, IOTC and NAFO.
  
  Contacts:

Florri Burton, Global Media Lead, Oceans Are Life, Greenpeace Nordic +447896523839, florri.burton@greenpeace.org Greenpeace International Press Desk: +31 (0)20 718 2470 (available 24 hours), pressdesk.int@greenpeace.org