What are the challenges of “openness” in environmental research of the climate crisis?
Between March and September 2021, a series of “OpenClimate community calls” will be hosted around different topics related to the connection and intersection between the climate crisis/climate action and the open movement. We’ll do short, easily digestible write-ups for each call, but if you’re interested in going more in-depth on the topics, we encourage you to 1) join the calls, 2) watch the call recordings, 3) follow along with call notes, or 4) suggest a topic that you’d like to present about or host.
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On June 29th (call recording), for our fourth Open Climate call, we had Myanna Lahsen and Sílvio Carlos as guests. Myanna Lahsen has a long tradition in the research of sustainability and is part of the National Institute for Space Research. Sílvio Carlos is a senior developer at the Socioenvironmental Institute, Brazil, which supports indigenous communities against mining and forest fires. An opening question was posed to begin the discussion from both of their standpoints: what are the challenges of openness in environmental research to tackle the climate crisis?
Lahsen began by posing a conundrum between both science and politics. She argued that “we have a very strong orientation towards anti-politics, which is to present science, and a desire for the public to understand science, as devoid of politics”. It is an understandable concern in terms of public perception of science, but she also posed that there must be openness in regards to mainstream science because this risks a limitation of the science agenda.
For example, global environmental change is usually portrayed in media as a natural event, and removed from human action, decisions and policies. This creates a problem in how people think about the science of climate change and it marginalizes the work of science, especially social sciences such as sociology and anthropology. According to data provided by Lahsen, the areas of focus in climate-change social sciences received 700% less funding than for natural sciences.
This is important because mainstream science also has interests that are based on power structures, needs and norms that are not being addressed due to a lack of openness in discussions regarding the politics of science. This in turn creates very little space for social change from the sciences. A conceptualization of what sciences are needed to advance knowledge as being focused on natural sciences is limiting. This much-needed dialogue between social sciences and natural sciences allows the public, in Lahsen’s words, “to calibrate what is presented as the truth”.
The current sociopolitical arena is being polarized, for example through the war on science and other movements that shift the public away from critical research on the science mainstream to understand the reality of climate change, and to communicate true claims more effectively. This is currently not the case for both sides of the polarized spectrum, according to Lahsen, where conservatives and liberals are more engaged in cultural laws than in the search for truth, where views that go against political agendas are seen as extreme. She noted that a current liberal view is that optimal trust is to be desired, instead of a healthy mix of trust and distrust. This extreme view moves funding and support towards certain areas of science and away from others.
Her closing argument revolved around the idea that socio-cultural systems are not static and sometimes considered as a black box with cultural views that change organically when the reality is different: the opinions and views of individuals are being interfered with through social media and other manipulations. Science has played a great part in creating this black box. For this reason, it is important to understand science from the perspective of the social impact that it poses: who are the individuals that obtain agency from science and who are the people affected by the views of natural science? The proposal is to help reshape how people view the values that technology and science portray in order to make better decisions around climate change.
Carlos started by describing his work, which spans different specialties, as a bridge between social and environmental work. The organization where he works, Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), supports the protection of indigenous lands. Some of the projects are Indigenous People in Brazil, Indigenous Lands, Protected Areas, Terras+, and Mapa.eco. ISA is currently focusing on environmental threats such as an increase in deforestation, fires, illegal mining, health issues, and violence towards traditional populations. Much of their work is focused on the eventual Amazon tipping point.
He started with a shortlist of possible challenges that the open movement has to deal with in relation to climate change:
He began with the concept of a time frame dissonance (citing Isabelle Stengers and the Slow Science Manifesto). This poses that there is an urgency to publish research, versus the need to solve things as fast as possible because there might not be a tomorrow. This leaves us with a patchwork of solutions that need to be solved and a stream of non-actionable studies. In other words, the need to obtain fast results ends up with non-useful results, which is a waste of time for science.
The second threat is obsolescence which is an environmental issue but also a challenge in building sustainable technologies. In a world where disruptive thinking is encouraged, it doesn’t require showing the transformative changes that the environmental situation needs. This deepens the threats posed by the colonial mega-machine to people. Carlos showed how the need for websites to be constantly upgraded is an example of obsolescence which drives work away from the important matters that technology should address.
The third is the lack of using trendy tech against durable, non-colonial systems. In a world with pressing issues of social and environmental justice, a mindset must be taken up in order to build technologies for the here and now. Carlos remarks: “sometimes projects fail not because they’re essentially not viable, but because the current context makes them not viable or because the default trend is too intense to give a chance for the new”. For this reason, it makes sense to look for good ideas in the graveyards of inventions and to understand that good projects take time to develop correctly.
The threat of term duration and union is, according to Carlos, a challenge that is related to the size of institutions. While bigger institutions are able to nurture long-term projects by assembling multiple smaller projects together. Small projects and researchers are not able to do the same, which leads to small institutions spending funds on doing duplicate work while sharing little information despite working towards the same goal. Even in the case of organizations working together, this is a problem that focuses on the short term, which makes it difficult to invest in shared system tools and data. For example, it is difficult to understand the work of the government and even more to collaborate with it.
Carlos also discussed how data threats are prevalent in terms of access, loss of data due to mass migrations, secrecy provisions, lack of funding, and censorship, among others. This creates an issue of not only processing and understanding data but also safeguarding it by making copies.
Finally, he spoke about the need to create narratives, not only in the sense of data visualization but from the view that there exist multiple viewpoints and narratives that must be designed beyond the operational tools that software provides. We need to go beyond objective science towards the realm of existential narratives and social causes.
