Today marks the first day of the Eye on Earth Summit, an alliance dedicated to the Rio 10 Principle of access to reliable, scientifically accurate and relevant information for environmental decision making. The multi-stakeholder alliance is dedicated to utilizing big data, existing networks and tackling the difficult issues of interoperability to prevent silos of information. Among the eight initiatives are:
- Access for All
- Water Security
- Global Network of Networks
- Environmental Education
- Biodiversity
- Community Sustainability and Resiliency
- Disaster Management
- Oceans and Blue Carbon
Conceived by the Abu Dhabi Environment Agency and their Global Environmental Data Initiative in partnership with the United Nations Environmental Programme, the alliance held its inaugural summit in 2011. The second summit, this October 6th – 8th in Abu Dhabi, coincides with the signing of the Sustainable Development Goals which will be the main theme for the event. The days are divided into “Data Demand,” “Data Supply” and “Enabling Conditions.”
Citizen science will play a crucial role in providing the scale and granularity necessary for informed environmental decision making. However many barriers still exist to translating this information to decision makers, known widely in the community as data quality and integrity, participation and motivation, sustainability and duplication prevention. This summit will focus on some of these issues and demonstrate possible solutions, new initiatives and technology that could tackle the information pipeline from civil society (citizen science) to local, regional, national and global environmental decision making.
Elizabeth Tyson, of the Commons Lab, won their blogging competition and has the honor of reporting for the event as the Official Eye on Earth Blogger. Follow along for daily blog posts on exciting panels such as:
- Addressing policy making demand,
- Donors demand for data and environmental data for business performance
- Collaborative research and activist knowledge for environmental justice
- Connecting networks to support environmental sustainability
- Understanding the costs of knowledge: cost of data generation and maintenance
- Reaching audiences through innovations in visualization
- Citizen scientists and their role in monitoring of local to global environmental change
- Policies, partnerships and open data for sustainable development
Additional media providing excellent coverage include, Muki Haklay’s of University College London’s blog, Po Ve Sham and @STIPcommonslab, #datarevolution, #EOESUMMIT15, @EKTyson.
