What are enabling conditions? Argar in a petri dish help grow bacteria to create cultures for studying microbes, using technology enables one to date a wider pool than whats in your social circle, small grants help fund the exploration of the potential of a big idea, learning Spanish not by classroom but by living in Mexico helps facilitate faster learning, zoning policy in cities requiring low-income housing enables access and diversity. These are but a few examples of enabling conditions that can be found across multiple disciplines, industries and governments. Mae Jemison on day two quoted the phrase, “the future doesn’t happen, its made.” The goal of day three was to explore the enabling conditions needed to make the future of creating and turning data into reliable environmental and societal information for decision making.
In the morning Inger Andersen, Director General of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, provided an estimate of 5 million USD a year to maintain the IUCN Redlist, which is the canonical database for the state of the worlds endangered species. This amount is “peanuts” in compared to other data collection initiatives according to Andersen who emphasized this by comparing it to the US census which spends 13 billion dollars every 10 years to understand demographics. However what’s consistently undervalued are the 300 years of volunteer time that go into updating that database. According to Anderson, and to the general citizen science community, the biggest word of caution moving forward is to maintain the spirit of volunteerism alive by providing the contributors with credit. This is not only the code of ethics in science and writing but its also human; give credit where its due and the 300 years of volunteer time will continue to grow from 300 to 600 years and beyond as the world becomes more connected.
Enabling condition: give citizen scientists credit where its due and see an increase in volunteer time.
Enrico Giovannini, an economist and statistician and Member of the Club of Rome, called for a “single state of the art system that should serve [the] international and [the] countries [with the goal of] efficiency and effectiveness.” In addition, Giovannini stated we should place pressure on the private sector, through the framework of open data, to share their data. This could be national policies which require private companies operating in their country to disclose all data collected about their resources (natural resources, demographic, economic). Giovannini ended with a bold statement, for countries to write in the sustainable development goals into their constitution. While that is a tall order — in the US there has been 27 amendments to the constitution in 226 years — what might be a more digestible step is to incorporate them into the missions of governmental and non-governmental organizations that are affiliated with one the 17 goals.
Enabling conditions: Prevent duplication through collaboration, pressure private companies to share data while respecting private personal information and build the SDG’s into governance frameworks.
Following the opening plenary was a panel on the “Polices, partnerships and open data for sustainable development” moderated by Willian Sontag, Initiatives Manager from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of International and Tribal Affairs. Tackling an extraordinarily important but narrow topic of methods for data in science and technology. One notable part of this presentation was the big data ecosystem workshops, led by CODATA in developing countries to increase best practices and therefore increase accuracy of data.
The afternoon panels focused on cutting edge technology and stories from the feet in the field; the people collecting the data or managing the volunteers who collect that data that make its way down the information pipeline. The feet in the field all emphasized the tremendous power of technology for turning data into information quickly in order to act on priority conservation areas. However, Liam Pin Koh, of conservationdrones.org, said it best, in that technology enables us to collect better data faster but the main goals are to acquire the data in any way possible.
Enabling condition: don’t rely solely on technology, continue to use all methods of data collection (oral, social, manual) but make an extra effort to digitize them and make them accessible to all.
Ayesha Yousef Al Biooshi, of the Abu Dhabi Environment Agency, shared methods of studying dugongs of which the UAE is home to the second largest population. The Conservation Leadership Programme advertised its capacity building program for young aspiring conservation leaders and lastly the the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund shared stories from their grantees; the fund provides small grants to young ecologists, biologists and conservation leaders to collect valuable data for their academic work.
Conclusion
The importance of follow ups from this conference will be revealed in the years to come as governments begin to set up their monitoring and reporting systems of the Sustainable Development Goals. Delegates from the Eye on Earth Summit will continue to tackle the problems of harmonizing data demand, supply and enabling conditions. Each leader from the founding five organizations stated in the final panel their dedication to leveraging their own communities for generating information in tandem with each other in order to monitor the sustainable development goals.
Jacqueline McGlade, of UNEP, demoed their web intelligence platform for tracking the SDG’s, UNEP live, which aggregates media stories about individual countries and their environmental initiatives among other environmental data, like citizen science. The media stories are particularly relevant because as McGlade noted, “governments are driven by what is written about them.” If thats so, the Eye on Earth, with these amazing leaders, will hopefully inspire governments as news gets out about this incredible alliance.
One suggestion moving forward for the next Eye on Earth summit is an emphasis on the process of collaboration. The convening reason for this alliance is based on the problem of “islands of data but only drops of information” and executing collaboration processes is the solution to building a bridge between these islands. Because of this, all presenters should spend at minimum one minute on how they work with other stakeholders to create a system of information for environmental and societal indicators. That way other organizations can learn from each other about best practices for collaboration.
I’ll leave readers with a quote from one of my favorite authors, Chimanadache Nigamonzi Adichie, about the “danger of a single story.” When we believe whole-heartedly in one single story we loose focus and disregard the possibility of other stories that describe the same thing. By bringing together organizations and individuals who care about the same thing – equitable access for all to data to inform decision making – but may approach it differently, we are able to listen to everyone’s story and leverage the information that they share.
I want to thank the organizers of the Eye on Earth Blogging Competition for this unique and amazing opportunity. While you might not have seen them, the media team are a crucial component to this alliance, the megaphone for communicating to the world what happened over the past three days.
I would also like to thank the Abu Dhabi Environmental Agency, the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative and the United Nations Environment Program for their visionary leadership in bringing together critical stakeholders and may this alliance continue to be a driving force in equitable and reliable information sharing in the age of meeting the sustainable development goals by 2030.
Lastly I will share my pledge: As a citizen science researcher with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for scholars in Washington, D.C., our organization strives to be a bridge between academia and policy, informing people on matters of international importance with reliable and actionable information. I have the incredible privilege to take what I learned here and bring it back to the United States and share with academics, policymakers and relevant organizations. I look forward to signing up my organization as a member of the Eye on Earth Alliance.
