Key decisions are needed in the next 12 months to set in motion a robust architecture and governance framework

David Jensen

Sep 11, 2019·25 min read

Authors: Jillian Campbell and David E Jensen, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

Reviewers and case study contributors: Brian Sullivan (Google), Lucas Joppa (Microsoft), Anne Bowser (Wilson Center), Steven Ramage (Group on Earth Observations), Gavin Starks (IceBreakerOne), Laurent Durieux (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development), Andrew Zolli (Planet), Alison Lowndes (Nvidia), Annie Virnig (UNDP) and Gary Lewis (UNEP).

A range of frontier and digital technologies have dramatically boosted the ways in which we can monitor the health of our planet. And sustain our future on it (Figure 1).

If we can leverage this technology effectively, we will be able to assess and predict risks, increase transparency and accountability in the management of natural resources and inform markets as well as consumer choice. These actions are all required if we are to stand a better chance of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

However, for this vision to become a reality, public and private sector actors must take deliberate action and collaborate to build a global digital ecosystem for the planet — one consisting of data, infrastructure, rapid analytics, and real-time insights. We are now at a pivotal moment in the history of our stewardship of this planet. A “tipping point” of sorts. And in order to guide the political action which is required to counter the speed, scope and severity of the environmental and climate crises, we must acquire and deploy these data sets and frontier technologies. Doing so can fundamentally change our economic trajectory and underpin a sustainable future.

This article shows how such a global digital ecosystem for the planet can be achieved — as well as what we risk if we do not take decisive action within the next 12 months. This is an extended version of the Foresight Brief issued by the UN Environment Programme in September 2019.

We human beings have given ourselves 10 more years to achieve the SDGs. But the next 12 months will be critical. During this short period of time the following determinative events will take place:

• The Climate Summit in New York in September 2019 will set the agenda for the next decade on climate change.
• The Climate COP in the UK in 2020 will revise the Paris Agreement.
• The Kunming COP on biological diversity will set new 20-year targets for the “more silent crisis” of the slow loss of nature.
• Finally, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea will set the agenda for the hydrosphere through a new global oceans treaty.

All available evidence shows that we are not on track to avert the two greatest existential environmental challenges on our doorstep: the climate crisis and the nature crisis (2). We are not even effectively measuring global progress against the SDGs. A total of 68% of the 93 environmental SDGs indicators cannot yet be measured due to a lack of data (Figure 2) (3). All efforts to marshal knowledge and action are thus required. Having a digital ecosystem in place will be absolutely critical to what happens to our home on this planet in the coming decades.

What’s at stake ?

Our world is undergoing dramatic digital transformations (Figure 3)(4). Over 90% of all the world’s data has been generated during the last two years (5). Mobile devices connect five billion people on the planet (6). New satellite technologies image the entire surface of the Earth every day down to a resolution of three meters (7). New cloud computing and artificial intelligence algorithms allow us to monitor, detect and predict environmental and climate threats based on a stream of earth observations, ground sensors and other data points (8, 9, 10). On top of all this, social media has become a political force. It shapes perceptions. It influences the fabric of civil discourse and dialogue on environmental challenges and climate change (11). And it also permits the acquisition of additional knowledge on the extent, shape and pattern of environmental challenges we face all across the planet.

In order to reach the point where we marshal the digital ecosystem to our advantage (28), policy makers, businesses and citizens need to more actively embrace the complexity, scale and magnitude of these changes and their consequences.

The challenge is that while there is broad recognition that humanity must capitalize on this massive increase in data generation and processing power (figure 3) to help monitor and manage the state of our planet, there is no common vision, directed strategy or governance framework (29). We still lack a planetary dashboard to monitor our critical natural resources and ecosystem services at the global, national and local levels. Moreover, we cannot capture the promise of frontier technologies for the planet if we don’t also address the potential perils and pitfalls.

Currently, a myriad of public and private sector actors is building data sets, digital infrastructure, algorithms and insights for the environment. But these actions are haphazard and fragmented. In a new — and welcome — development, private sector actors are beginning to offer digital public goods and related analysis (30). But this is happening without a broader understanding of the long-term business models and incentives that should sustain and finance these services. A global conversation is therefore needed to determine how these efforts can best sustain global public goods, protect privacy, achieve inter-operability and keep quality standards high. Finally, we need to decide how to govern and pay for this digital ecosystem. This will yield answers to the question of how to maintain a balance between public and private sector interests and incentives.

But the first step is to start ratcheting-up talk about our digital ecosystem for the planet.

Building a Digital Ecosystem for the Planet

Some of this work has already started. The UN Science-Policy Business Forum established a working group on “Data, Analytics and AI” back in May 2018. The aim was to kick-start a global conversation to seize opportunities and establish appropriate safeguards and effective governance. Over 100 stakeholders were involved. Among them were scientific and citizen-science research communities, government and policy institutions, a variety of technology companies and non-governmental organizations. Early in 2019, the working group produced a number of clear ideas making a strong case for a digital ecosystem. These are contained here “The Case for a Digital Ecosystem on the Environment” (31, 32).

The remaining sections of this article summarize the arguments in that paper. Again, these are perspectives from a cross-section of thought leaders determined to secure a solid evidentiary basis for fixing our planet’s environmental crises.

The main call to action of this article is for public and private sector actors to continue building on this common vision.

The global digital ecosystem should consist of four elements: a) raw data, b) a supporting technological infrastructure, c) algorithms and analytics; d) insights and applications. All this will then be used to support a transformation in our thinking and behavior. One which produces a social tipping point and delivers different sustainability outcomes (see Figure 4).

A digital ecosystem can be defined as ‘a complex distributed network or interconnected socio-technological system’. It features adaptive properties like self-organization and scalability. In this sense, a digital ecosystem, much like natural ecosystems, is characterized by both competition and collaboration among its many diverse public and private sector components.

But it is the numerous interactions and linkages between these seemingly individual or autonomous entities that make an ecosystem functional. Similarly, a digital ecosystem for the planet must connect individual data sets with algorithms and analysis in order to create robust and timely environmental insights and intelligence. It must generate the correct insights at the right scale. It must deliver these at the right time and in the right format. Their goal must be to influence decision-making, action and — crucially — future investment.

As data flows through the ecosystem, it is eventually transformed into insights that can be used for decision making to achieve other sustainability outcomes (Figure 3). Governance strategies and standards will be needed for each step of the transformation process:

• Raw Data: The foundation of a digital ecosystem is numerous data sources, including small and big data on environment. These must be collected through various methodologies including official statistical reporting, earth observations, in-situ sensors, citizen science, commercial datasets and other relevant data streams. The ecosystem will include essential information such as metadata documentation and provenance, licensing, collection methodologies and peer review. It will need to delimit for potential biases, confidence levels and relevant use constraints. For each type of data source, standards and guidance will need to be adopted for quality assurance, data labeling and inter-operability (34,35,36,37). This will also require investments to ensure that data models are developed in a way that informs policy and that data is structured and managed in a way that allows high-quality, comparable and trusted analysis. At a minimum, contributors to scientific data pools must be required to publish FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) (38).
• Infrastructure: The infrastructure for a digital ecosystem will store, process and connect existing databases. It must seek to improve metadata, discoverability and accessibility. For obvious reasons, due to the volume and complexity of such data, it will be impossible to host it centrally. But an ecosystem does not require that all data be pulled into a single central location. Rather the focus will be on bringing data, algorithms and processing power together in various clouds. These will be connected in a manner where data can flow and interoperate seamlessly. But this will require compliance with open application programming interfaces (APIs) and other emerging standards. For this reason, all actors contributing to the digital ecosystem will be obliged to publish information on the infrastructure they are using together with information about their open source and commercial software.
• Algorithms and Analytics: Data and supporting infrastructure are, together, the backbone of the digital ecosystem. But these will require algorithms and analytics in order to extract actionable insights and business intelligence. Data science and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are already available and growing in number and quality. These will be used to yield data insights. But processes are needed to ensure quality and transparency while avoiding bias and protecting privacy. Peer reviews, open algorithms, and public documentation of processing methods will be essential to ensure public trust.
• Insights and Applications: The final part of the process is to transform the knowledge thus generated into actionable insights and evidence. End users need to integrate multiple information streams into metrics and performance dashboards. Such insights and evidence must be made comprehensible to decision-makers, investors, consumers and citizens alike. Timing is essential if public participation, accountability and market pressure is to be sustained in pursuit of the sustainability goal. So is placement, scale and format. Public trust in the resulting insights will be best assured when applications are co-designed together with end users and related institutions. Increasingly, we are witnessing calls for companies to publish information on the business models they are using. This will be needed if potential conflicts of interest can be identified and managed.

The aim is to eventually use the insights to produce outcomes that power sustainability for people and planet. These can include:

• real-time planetary monitoring and predictive analytics for global and national environmental targets — a basic planetary dashboard;
• environmental risk information to markets and commodity supply chains;
• product sustainability information to inform and nudge consumers; and,
• verified scientific information for social media to educate and engage citizens.

What is already being done?

The foundations of a global digital ecosystem for the planet are already being built and tested by a variety of public and private sector actors. The following examples point the way. They show how a combination of data sets and new technologies can provide environmental insights and intelligence that are better, faster, cheaper and easier to access when compared with business as usual. They also show how new sources of data can be collected from a combination of public and private actors as well as citizens. Importantly, these examples are committed to publishing derived data products in an open format as a digital public good, contributing to open source software and adopting important global standards and transparency measures.

Global Forest Watch and Resource Watch

The World Resources Institute (WRI) is one of the leading non-governmental organizations to leverage the power of frontier technologies for monitoring the pulse of the planet. Global Forest Watch (GFW) is an open-source web application to monitor global forests in near real-time using satellite images and AI. The GFW is an initiative of the World Resources Institute, with partners including Google, USAID, the University of Maryland, Esri, Vizzuality, GEF, UNEP and many other academic, non-profit, public, and private organizations.

More recently, Resource Watch was established to extend the monitoring capabilities to other natural resources using open geospatial data and statistics. Resource Watch provides journalists, analysts, decision makers, and students the opportunity to explore more than 200 available data sets on the state of the environment, including access to an open API for data sharing. Collaboration with Resource Watch has also enabled the National Geographic Society to launch EarthPulse — a data-driven platform that enables the operational monitoring of key global ecosystems across the planet for decision-makers. Summary dashboards provide actionable information that are updated with the best scientific datasets. The dashboards are augmented with emotionally engaging storytelling and photos to bring the data to life.

Global Surface Water Extent — SDG 6.6.1 app

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), Google Earth Engine and UNEP teamed up to develop the sdg661.app for Water-Related Ecosystems. The Surface Water Viewer shows changes in global water extent based on satellite images and AI. The period covered is 1984 to 2018. It uses interactive maps, graphs and full-data downloads. This yields a globally consistent and robust set of critical statistics for every country’s annual surface water. The platform relies on machine-learning algorithms to automatically detect the presence or absence of surface water and it highlights changes over time. This data is currently being used as a globally consistent baseline for SDG indicator 6.6.1 (change in extent of water-related ecosystems over time) with UNEP offering quality control and data custodianship.

UN Biodiversity Lab

The UN Biodiversity Lab aims to help countries increase the amount of spatial data and analysis used in their 6th National Reports to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The Lab combines over 100 global high-quality spatial datasets with analysis, visualization, and storytelling tools. It has been designed specifically for policymakers with the aim of helping them make evidence-based decisions for conservation and sustainable development. All reporting countries are provided with customized private cloud workspaces for uploading and analyzing national data in the context of broader global datasets. The tool is simple and easy to use. It does not require any previous experience in mapping software.

A powerful partnership funded by the GEF and the UNDP Innovation Facility, the Lab brings together technical partners including the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, NASA, IUCN, and MapX, an open source web mapping architecture developed by UNEP and GRID-Geneva. Countries that used the UN Biodiversity Lab to help them monitor and report on the status of nature increased their use of spatial data by over 200 percent.

The UN Biodiversity Lab continues to evolve. It plans to support countries to move beyond reporting to identify nature-based solutions that can safeguard biodiversity while combating the climate crisis and fostering sustainable development. As part of this agenda, it will upgrade its interoperability with other biodiversity and protected areas platforms including Protected Planet, the Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA), the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (BIP) Dashboard and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Space Climate Observatory

The Space Climate Observatory (SCO) is an international initiative set in motion at the end of 2017 by France on the eve of the One Planet Summit. Its goal is to combine satellite and field data with scientific research to model, predict and track climate change and its impact. It does so at national, regional and local levels. It harvests information from 20 space agencies including: Europe, China, India, Mexico, Brazil, France, UAE. The SCO programme is expected to play a key role in monitoring the implementation of a number of SDGs.

SCO uses a combination of space technologies, targeted measurements and relevant models cross-referenced with socio-economic data. The ultimate goal is to provide climate change impact scenarios for decision-makers to respond to the challenges of adapting to and coping with these impacts. The SCO was officially launched by President Emmanuel Macron in June of 2019 during the Paris Air Show. On this occasion more than 20 space agencies and international organizations (UNDP and UNOOSA) signed a Joint Declaration of Interest for the creation of the SCO.

The Open Data Cube

Geoscience Australia developed and released the Open Data Cube technology and it has subsequently been supported, developed and promoted by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites and the Group on Earth Observations (Figure 4). It has been modified and deployed in Colombia and Switzerland with approximately 50 other countries at different levels of maturity and use. Digital Earth Africa will build on Open Data Cube (39) technology to deliver a unique continental-scale platform.

The aim is to “democratize” access to operational and analysis-ready satellite data. It will track changes across Africa in the following areas: soil and coastal erosion, agriculture, forest and desert development, water quality and changes to human settlements. And it will do so in unprecedented detail. A Steering Committee for Phase I of Digital Earth Africa was formed in 2018 and has broad representation, including Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, as well as from the World Economic Forum, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the Group on Earth Observations.

The Allen Coral Atlas

Given the massive threats to coral reefs from climate change, pollution and acidification, a number of global efforts are underway to monitor their health. These efforts use frontier technology and data integration from multiple sources. One of these is the Allen Coral Atlas. This is a global coral conservation effort to map all of the world’s shallow-water coral reefs in unprecedented detail. The process involves continuous monitoring for change using high-resolution satellites, field data and artificial intelligence. The effort is a collaboration between Vulcan, Planet, Arizona State University, University of Queensland and the National Geographic Society.

Earth Challenge 2020

Earth Challenge 2020 will help engage millions of global citizens in collecting and sharing one billion open and interoperable data points. These cover: air and water quality, pollution, biodiversity, food systems and climate change. Citizen science volunteers from around the world, working with professional scientists, will collect and share earth science data in their local communities. This will be done through a massive campaign leveraging mobile apps and other sensors. Earth Challenge is a partnership between the Earth Day Network, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and other partners to be powered by Amazon Web Services using in-kind credits.

Icebreaker One

Icebreaker One — named after the workshop process of bringing people together — gathers financial markets, public sector institutions, asset owners and the science community into a common space. It aims to unlock the finance, data and innovation needed to address our climate and biodiversity emergencies. Icebreaker One is focussed on the cultural mechanics of data publishing and use: developing common principles and practice. It builds on existing work (e.g. in Geospatial, IoT), bringing together initiatives and organisations to demonstrate the investment case for development, and on specific interventions — such as data licensing — that require cross-sector action. Icebreaker One aims to unlock and integrate the data that can influence investment decisions of $3.6T/year to deliver net-zero or net-negative outcomes, unlocking a marketplace for data sharing through common principles and practice, and $50M/year in leveraged finance for innovation.

Overcoming the risks

A digital ecosystem for the planet will not come easily. How to build, finance and maintain such a “digital public good” will be a challenge. As will how to harness it as an accountability mechanism for achieving the SDGs.

Four key governance risks need to be addressed.

1. Monopolies linked to global datasets: Currently, much of the big data and technological infrastructure are held by a handful of companies. This creates a market risk in terms of who has access to use data to make decisions, influence markets and determine investments. It also creates concerns in terms of privacy, data security and dependencies. As companies release a swarm of satellites, drones, sensors and mobile applications to capture information on the earth’s natural resources, it is important to ask how this wealth of data will be governed, how power asymmetries will be mitigated and how anti-trust regulations will be updated (40). We need to understand what incentives, safeguards and standards are needed to ensure that environmental data and processing power are used to help humanity solve long-term global environmental challenges rather than exacerbate existing inequalities and digital colonialism.

2. Quality, transparency and openness of data and algorithms: As mentioned, this includes metadata standards, data licensing, provenance and traceability, interoperability and disclosure of potential biases and confidence limits. As companies take an increasing role in the generation of digital public goods, we need to ensure that the quality of data and algorithms are not compromised by the allure of short-term profits. Or the influence of biased and erroneous data as well as misinformation, fake news and “alternative facts”. The potential role of actors such as the UN to serve as impartial honest brokers of data in non-commercial settings should be explored.

3. Protecting individual privacy, data security and intellectual property. There are privacy risks related to data which is collected on (or from) individuals. Protecting privacy, intellectual property and security must be core to the design criteria in building the digital ecosystem. There must also be a recognition that some data will, of necessity, remain only at the national level and be governed by national priorities, context and culture. Existing frameworks such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can help build such protection frameworks within the global digital ecosystem. Increasingly, as algorithms begin to manipulate human agency and exploit human vulnerabilities, we also need to protect against a scenario of hyper consumption fueled by surveillance capitalism (41) and persuasive technologies (42). The privacy and security implications of national regulatory regimes that govern cloud-based data centers also needs serious consideration.

4. Direct environmental impacts: as reliance on computers and data centers grows, governments and technology companies need to implement measures to reduce their direct environmental impact. This includes using renewable energy solutions across the data ecosystem, addressing e-waste management and improving responsible supply chain sourcing.

Finally, and although this is not a “risk” in the strict sense of the term, the effort to build a digital ecosystem will come to nothing unless governments, academics, the media and citizens build their own capacity to engage, use and communicate environmental insights in a meaningful way. This is necessary to avoid the significant risks, commercial dependencies and power asymmetries that could follow if they do not. A global ecosystem for data, infrastructure, algorithms and insights must foster national engagement and buy-in for data to be used for SDGs implementation, policy development and evidence-based behaviors. This must go hand in hand with agile governance models as well as new norms, ethics and values that can guide how the technology sector can contribute positively to sustainability and digital public goods. Above all, we need to learn how to overcome the echo chambers, toxic digital discourse and perverse incentives in the “attention economy” that tend to undermine collective action on the environment (43). We must also learn how to combat digital addiction by putting down our phones and seeking experiences that reconnect us with the natural world.

What needs to happen next

To move forward with a digital ecosystem for our planet, we need to improve on this vision. We need to develop the business case, new business models and public-private partnership frameworks. We need to combine existing and new standards. More than this, we need to do the following:

• The UN Science-Policy Business Forum’s Working Group on Data, Analytics and AI must continue to address these challenges. It must come with an action plan by the next meeting in September 2020 — adopt it — and then start implementing it.
• All UN member states, international institutions and relevant non-governmental organizations must clarify their own policy positions on how a digital ecosystem for the planet can be built, paid-for and governed in the next 12 months. There is an urgent need for international leadership that can offer a vision, a coordinated strategy and funding to connect the environmental community and policy-makers with technologists and coders (44) (45).
• The Global Environment Outlook and World Environment Situation Room of UN Environment Programme should be powered by frontier technologies and big data. A special debate and resolution on this topic should be considered for the next UN Environment Assembly and in the implementation of the global environmental data strategy (46).
• Different funding bodies such as the Global Environment Facility, the Green Climate Fund, and the World Bank should consider how they can leverage existing and future investments to positively influence the shape of the emerging digital ecosystem for the planet.
• The private sector and experts in frontier technologies must continue to work hand in hand with domain experts from different environmental fields as well as end users of environmental data such as banks, pension funds and insurance companies. They must explore practical applications and use cases for solving different environmental and climate challenges while using technology to drive sustainability(47).
• Citizens will need to be engaged in using and collecting data in order to make better environmental decisions and to better engage in a dialogue on the environment with companies and political actors.
• These efforts should be connected to the UN Global Pulse initiative and the work of the UN High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, including the to the recent report of the panel “The Age of Digital Interdependence” (48). We need to define environmental data streams that comprise digital public goods and imagine new multi-lateral multi-stakeholder processes and institutions that can govern these challenges with coalitions of the willing.

We may worry that building a digital ecosystem for the planet sounds like an ambitious dream. But humanity has successfully come together to achieve similar fantastic visions. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN (estimated to cost USD 1 billion per year) is one example. The Human Genome Project (estimated at USD 200 million per year) is another. These are impressive examples of international cooperation at-scale. They have generated global public goods which continue to propel human knowledge and well-being.

In many ways, we have invested at the atomic, genetic and cellular levels in global cooperation frameworks on a grand scale. Similar cooperation is now needed to build a digital ecosystem for our planet. This is the next logical progression. Our planetary security depends on it.

So here is the call to action. It is time for stakeholders in all domains to unite in building a common vision for a digital ecosystem of data, infrastructure, algorithms and insights to provide actionable evidence on our collective progress towards sustainable development.

A future that leverages the digital revolution for the planet is ours to imagine and create. The future is what we make it. And it is happening now.

The discussion on building a digital ecosystem for the planet continued on two new articles on Medium. The first identifies and elaborates on three primary engagement tracks: system architecture, applications, and governance. These served to encompass a set of 20 decisive priorities intended to be actionable goals. Within these three tracks, the second article identifies the top 20 most crucial multi-stakeholder processes that we must engage and influence in 2020.

Acknowledgements

Research and Editorial Support: Angela Kim and Theresa Dearden (UNEP)

Graphics: Yalun Jin and Tsubasa Enomoto (UNEP). Babar Mumtaz (IT Solution Hub).

References

1. The full range of frontier technologies addressed by this brief includes satellites, drones and in situ sensors, cloud and edge computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, social media and platforms, the internet of things, blockchain and distributed databases, virtual reality, augmented reality and a range of open source and commercial software together with mobile phone applications.

2. See: IPBES (2019). Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science- Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz, and H. T. Ngo (editors). IPBES Secretariat, Bonn; IPCC (2018). IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C approved by governments. International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Secretariat, Geneva; World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 12, December 2017, Pages 1026–1028; UN Environment (2019). Global Environmental Outlook 6. UN Environment, Nairobi.

3. UN Environment. (2019). Measuring Progress Towards achieving the environmental dimension of the SDGs. UN Environment, Nairobi. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from: https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/27627/MeaProg2019.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

4. UN High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. (2019). The age of digital inter-dependence. UN, New York. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.un.org/en/pdfs/DigitalCooperation-report-for%20web.pdf

5. SINTEF. (2013, May 22). Big Data, for better or worse: 90% of world’s data generated over last two years. ScienceDaily. Retrieved 19 June 2019 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522085217.htm

6. GSMA Intelligence. (2019). Definitive data and analysis for the mobile industry. Retrieved 19 June 2019 from https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/

7. Marshall, W. (2017). Planet Mission 1 Complete! Planet. Retrieved 19 June 2019 from https://www.planet.com/pulse/mission-1/

8. Sullivan, B. (2019). A new app to monitor the world’s fresh water supply. Google Blog. Retrieved 1 July from: https://www.blog.google/products/earth/new-app-map-and-monitor-worlds-freshwater-supply/

9. Dille, P., and C. Herwig. (2019). An inside look at google time lapse. Retrieved 1 July 2019 from https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/06/an-inside-look-at-google-earth-timelapse.html

10. AT&T. (2019). Climate resiliency community challenge. Retrieved 1 July 2019 from https://about.att.com/newsroom/2019/climate_resiliency_community_challenge.html

11. Moss, S. (2019). How social media is inspiring children to save the natural world. Guardian. Retrieved 1 July 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/social-media-inspiring-children-to-save-natural-world

12. Pixalytics (2019). How many satellites orbiting the Earth in 2019? Retrieved on 14 May 2019 from https://www.pixalytics.com/satellites-orbiting-earth-2019/

13. Union of Concerned Scientists (2018). UCS Satellite Database. Retrieved on 18 February 2019 from https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/space-weapons/satellite-database#.XGwQx-gzbIV

14. Columbus, L. (2016). Roundup of Internet of Things Forecast and Market Estimates, 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2019 from https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/11/27/roundup-of-internet-of-things-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2016/#17d8afac292d

15. Worth, D. (2014). Internet of Things to generate 400 zettabytes of data by 2018. Retrieved 18 February 2019 from https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2379626/internet-of-things-to-generate-400-zettabytes-of-data-by-2018

16. Sawyers, P. (2017). 5 billion people now have a mobile phone connection, according to GSMA data. Retrieved 18 February 2019 from https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/13/5-billion-people-now-have-a-mobile-phone-connection-according-to-gsma-data/

17. Statista (2018). Number of apps available in leading app stores as of 3rd quarter 2018. Retrieved 18 February 2019 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/

18. Internet World Stats (2018). World Internet Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved 18 February 2019 from https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

19. Domo (2019). Data never sleeps 7.0. Retrieved 18 June 2019 from https://www.domo.com/learn/data-never-sleeps-7

20. Baffour, B., King, T. and Valente, P. (2013). The Modern Census: Evolution, Examples and Evaluation. 11. https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_319099/UQ319099OA.pdf?

21. Team eBird (2018). 500 million eBird records. Retrieved 22 February 2019 from https://ebird.org/news/500-million-ebird-records

22. Swedish LifeWatch (2017). Swedish LifeWatch — a national e-infrastructure for biodiversity data. ArtDatabanken SLU. https://www.slu.se/globalassets/ew/subw/lifewatch/publikationer/slw-summary-report-web.pdf

23. iNaturalist (2019). How it Works. Retrieved 18 February 2019 from https://www.inaturalist.org/

24. National Science Board (2018). Outputs of S&E Research: Publications. In 2018 Indicators Report. Alexandria: National Science Foundation. chapter Chapter 5: Academic Research and Development. 112. https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsb20181/assets/968/academic-research-and-development.pdf

25. Global Reporting Initiative (2016). Sustainability Disclosure Database. Retrieved 18 February 2019 from http://database.globalreporting.org/

26. The World Bank (2000). Managing Records as the Basis for Effective Service Delivery and Public Accountability in Development. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTARCHIVES/Resources/Core%20Principles.pdf

27. World Bank (2019). World Bank Open Data. https://data.worldbank.org/

28. Thompson, C. (2019). We need a data rich picture of what’s killing the planet. WIRED. San Francisco. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from: https://www.wired.com/story/we-need-data-rich-picture-climate-change/

29. World Economic Forum (2017). 4th Industrial Revolution for Earth. Cologny. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Harnessing_the_4IR_for_the_Earth.pdf

30. Hao, K. (2019). Here are 10 ways AI could help fight climate change. MIT Technology Review. Harvard. Retrieved 1 July 2019 from: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613838/ai-climate-change-machine-learning/

31. Jensen, D. and J. Campbell (2019). Discussion paper: The Case for a Digital Ecosystem for the Environment: Bringing together data, algorithms and insights for sustainable development. Science Policy Business Forum. UN Environment, Nairobi. Retrieved 1 July 2019 from: https://un-spbf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Digital-Ecosystem-final-2.pdf

32. UN Science Policy Business Forum. (2019). Work on big data gets a big boost. Retrieved 1 July 2019 from https://un-spbf.org/2019/04/10/work-on-big-data-gets-a-big-boost/

33. Figure 4 was inspired by a presentation entitled “Artificial Intelligence for Earth” by Lucas Joppa, Chief Environmental Scientist, Microsoft Corporation. It was delivered to the Eye on Earth Alliance on 23 May 2018.

34. Citizen Science Association. Data and Metadata Working Group. Retrieved 1 July 2019 from https://www.citizenscience.org/working-groups/data-and-metadata-working-group/

35. Open Geospatial Consortium. OGC Standards and Supporting Documents. Retrieved on 1 July 2019 from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards

36. Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange standards. Retrieved on 1 July 2019 from https://sdmx.org/?page_id=5008

37. Spatio Temporal Asset Catalogue. Retrieved on 1 July 2019 from https://stacspec.org/

38. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Retrieved 1 July 2019 from https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/

39. Open Data Cube. Retrieved 14 May 2019 from https://www.opendatacube.org/about

40. Gibbs, W. (2019). A View From Everywhere All the Time. Anthropocene Magazine. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2019/06/a-view-from-everywhere%E2%80%89-all-the-time/

41. Zuboff, S. (2018). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books. London.

42. Harris, T. (2019). Tech Is ‘Downgrading Humans.’ It’s Time to Fight Back. WIRED. San Francisco. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.wired.com/story/tristan-harris-tech-is-downgrading-humans-time-to-fight-back/

43. Rushkoff, D. (2019). Team Human. W.W. Norton and Company. New York.

44. Lahoz-Monfort, J. et al. (2019). A Call for International Leadership and Coordination to Realize the Potential of Conservation Technology. BioScience, 4 September 2019. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

45. Thompson, C. (2019). Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. Penguin Press, New York.

46. UN Environmental Assembly. (2019). Ministerial declaration of the United Nations Environment Assembly at its fourth session. UNEP/EA.4/HLS.1. Nairobi.

47. A good example of this is summarized in an article by Hao, K. (2019). Here are 10 ways AI could help fight climate change. MIT Technology Review. Harvard. This article is based on a more detailed paper is retrieved 1 July 2019 from: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.05433.pdf

48. UN High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. (2019). The age of digital inter-dependence. UN, New York. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.un.org/en/pdfs/DigitalCooperation-report-for%20web.pdf

We welcome the following people to read and help distribute our paper

Jaron Lanier Renee DiResta Tristan Harris Clive Thompson Yuval Noah Harari Douglas Rushkoff Danny Fortson Rebecca Moore Steven Johnson Aidan O’Sullivan Andrea Servida Radu Surdeanu pierrick poulenas Wayt Gibbs monika bielskyte Steven Brumby Andy Revkin Alex Dehgan Alexander Verbeek Charles Iceland Craig Mills Karl Burkart Nicolas Miailhe Julien Cornebise Amy Luers Heather Savory Benjamin Kumpf Chris Anderson Norberto Andrade Rob Nail Yann LeCun Verity Harding Jack Clark Siyan Xu Henri Verdier Thomas Gass Steven Tebbe Robert Kirkpatrick Heather Leson Fei-Fei Li Andreas Hartl Jake Porway Gina Lucarelli Giulio Marchi Erik Lindquist Hamed Alemohammad Hunter S Goldman Kai-Fu Lee Leonardo DiCaprio Annie Virnig Ev Williams marianne haahr Jovan Kurbalija Nicholas Thompson Emily Dreyfuss danah boyd Tim Wu Ethan Zuckerman Gunther Sonnenfeld Alan Laubsch Mike Butcher Pilita Clark Alex Hern Madhumita Venkataramanan Jon Russell Eric Mack

Hashtags

#data4good #tech4good #ai4good #digitalecosystem #datascience #data4sustainability #data4sdgs