international

The Untapped Potential of Computing and Cognition in Tackling Climate Change

Curated on May 3, 2023May 3, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Adiba Proma, Robert Wachter and Ehsan Hoque: “Alongside the search for climate-protecting technologies like EVs, more effort needs to be directed to harnessing technology to promote climate-protecting behavior change. This will take focus, leadership, and cooperation among technologists, investors, business executives, educators, and governments. Unfortunately, such focus, leadership, and cooperation have been lacking.

Persuading people to change their lifestyles to benefit the next generations is a significant challenge. We argue that simple changes in how technologies are built and deployed can significantly lower society’s carbon footprint.

While it is challenging to influence human behavior, there are opportunities to offer nudges and just-in-time interventions by tweaking certain aspects of technology. For example, the “Climate Pledge Friendly” tag added to products that meet Amazon’s sustainability standards can help users identify and purchase ecofriendly products while shopping online [3]. Similarly, to help users make more ecofriendly choices while traveling, Google Flights provides information on average carbon dioxide emission for flights and Google Maps tags the “most fuel-efficient” route for vehicles.

Computer scientists can draw on concepts from psychology, moral dilemma, and human cooperation to build technologies that can encourage people to lead ecofriendly lifestyles. Many mobile health applications have been developed to motivate people to exercise, eat a healthy diet, sleep better, and manage chronic diseases. Some apps designed to improve sleep, mental wellbeing, and calorie intake have as many as 200 million active users. The use of apps and other internet tools can be adapted to promote lifestyle changes for climate change. For example, Google Nest rewards users with a “leaf” when they meet an energy goal…(More)”.

Chandler Good Government Index

Curated on May 3, 2023May 3, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Chandler Institute of Governance (CIG): “…a polycrisis shines an intense spotlight on a government, and asks many difficult questions of it: How can a government cope with relentless change and uncertainty? How do they learn to maintain stability while adapting effectively? How can they distinguish what are the most important capabilities required, and then assess for themselves their own government’s strengths and weaknesses? The CGGI was built to help answer questions precisely like these.
Why Capabilities Matter for Managing a Polycrisis: This edition of the CGGI annual report offers a special
focus on how the pillars of good government stand together in the face of a polycrisis. Drawing on the 35 capabilities and outcomes indicators of the CGGI we examine in particular depth:
– How Public Institutions Are Better Responding to Crises. We explore how a government’s leaders, civil service and institutions come together to prepare and respond.
– Building Shared Prosperity. How are governments confronting inflation and the costof-living crisis while still creating opportunities for more efficient marketplaces that support trade and sustain good jobs? We dive into a few ways.
– Strong Nations Are Healthy and Inclusive. We spotlight how governments are building more
inclusive communities and resilient health systems…(More)”.

DMA: rules for digital gatekeepers to ensure open markets start to apply

Curated on May 3, 2023May 3, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) applies from today. Now that the DMA applies, potential gatekeepers that meet the quantitative thresholds established have until 3 July to notify their core platform services to the Commission. ..

The DMA aims to ensure contestable and fair markets in the digital sector. It defines gatekeepers as those large online platforms that provide an important gateway between business users and consumers, whose position can grant them the power to act as a private rule maker, and thus create a bottleneck in the digital economy. To address these issues, the DMA defines a series of specific obligations that gatekeepers will need to respect, including prohibiting them from engaging in certain behaviours in a list of do’s and don’ts. More information is available in the dedicated Q&A…(More)”.

Financing the Common Good

Curated on May 1, 2023May 3, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Mariana Mazzucato: “…The international monetary system which emerged in the aftermath of World War II undoubtedly represented an important innovation. But its structure is no longer fit for purpose. The challenges we face today—from climate change to public-health crises—are complex, interrelated and global in nature. Our financial institutions must reflect this reality.

Because the financial system echoes the logic of the entire economic system, this will require a more fundamental change: we must broaden the economic thinking that has long underpinned institutional mandates. To shape the markets of the future, maximising public value in the process, we must embrace an entirely new economics.

Most economic thinking today assigns the state and multilateral actors responsibility for removing barriers to economic activity, de-risking trade and finance and levelling the playing-field for business. As a result, governments and international lenders tinker around the edges of markets, rather than doing what is actually needed—deliberately shaping the economic and financial system to advance the common good…(More)”.

Air-Pollution Knowledge Is Power

Curated on May 1, 2023May 3, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Chana R. Schoenberger: “What happens when people in countries where the government offers little pollution monitoring learn that the air quality is dangerous? A new study details how the US Embassy in Beijing began to monitor the Chinese capital’s air-pollution levels and tweet about them in 2008. The program later extended to other US embassies in cities around the world. The practice led to a measurable decline in air pollution in those cities, few of which had local pollution monitoring before, the researchers found.

The paper’s authors, Akshaya Jha, an assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and Andrea La Nauze, a lecturer at the School of Economics at the University of Queensland, used satellite data to compare pollution levels, measured annually. The researchers found that the level of air pollution went down after the local US embassy began tweeting pollution numbers from monitoring equipment that diplomatic personnel had installed.

The embassy program yielded a drop in fine-particulate concentration levels of 2 to 4 micrograms per square meter, leading to a decline in premature mortality worth $127 million for the median city in 2019. “Our findings point to the substantial benefits of improving the availability and salience of air-quality information in low- and middle-income countries,” Jha and La Nauze write.

News coverage of the US government’s Beijing pollution monitoring sparked the researchers’ interest, La Nauze says. At the time, American diplomats were quoted saying that the embassy’s tweets led to marked changes in pollution levels in Beijing. When the researchers learned that the US State Department had extended the program to embassies around the world, they thought there might be a way to evaluate the diplomats’ claims empirically.

A problem the researchers confronted was how to quantify the impact of measuring something that had never been measured before…(More)” – See also: US Embassy Air-Quality Tweets Led to Global Health Benefits

What Was the Fact?

Curated on May 1, 2023May 1, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jon Askonas: “…Centuries ago, our society buried profound differences of conscience, ideas, and faith, and in their place erected facts, which did not seem to rise or fall on pesky political and philosophical questions. But the power of facts is now waning, not because we don’t have enough of them but because we have so many. What is replacing the old hegemony of facts is not a better and more authoritative form of knowledge but a digital deluge that leaves us once again drifting apart.

As the old divisions come back into force, our institutions are haplessly trying to neutralize them. This project is hopeless — and so we must find another way. Learning to live together in truth even when the fact has lost its power is perhaps the most serious moral challenge of the twenty-first century…

Our understanding of what it means to know something about the world has comprehensively changed multiple times in history. It is very hard to get one’s mind fully around this.

In flux are not only the categories of knowable things, but also the kinds of things worth knowing and the limits of what is knowable. What one civilization finds intensely interesting — the horoscope of one’s birth, one’s weight in kilograms — another might find bizarre and nonsensical. How natural our way of knowing the world feels to us, and how difficult it is to grasp another language of knowledge, is something that Jorge Luis Borges tried to convey in an essay where he describes the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, a fictional Chinese encyclopedia that divides animals into “(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, … (f) fabulous ones,” and the real-life Bibliographic Institute of Brussels, which created an internationally standardized decimal classification system that divided the universe into 1,000 categories, including 261: The Church; 263: The Sabbath; 267: Associations. Y. M. C. A., etc.; and 298: Mormonism…(More)”.

Has 21st century policy gone medieval?

Curated on May 1, 2023May 1, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Tim Harford: “Criminal justice has always been a source of knotty problems. How to punish the guilty while sparing the innocent? Trial by ordeal was a neat solution: delegate the decision to God. In the Middle Ages, a suspect who insisted on their innocence might be asked to carry a piece of burning iron for a few paces. If the suspect’s hand was unharmed, God had pronounced them innocent. If God is benevolent, omnipotent and highly interventionist, this idea works. Otherwise this judicial ordeal punishes innocent and guilty alike, inflicting harm without sorting good from bad.

Suella Braverman, the UK’s home secretary, and her “dream” of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, is an eerie 21st-century echo of a medieval idea. In a way, the comparison is unfair to the medieval courts. Judicial ordeals really were designed to solve a policy problem, while the government’s Rwanda rhetoric is designed to deflect attention from strikes, NHS waiting lists and a stagnating economy.

But in other ways the comparison is apt. Deporting migrants to Rwanda, or similar deliberate cruelties such as separating parents from their children at the US-Mexican border, might well be expected to deter some attempts to enter the country, while those fleeing murderous regimes would come regardless.

Many people, myself included, draw the line at “deliberate cruelties”. But public policy is full of ordeal-like interventions: long waits, arduous paperwork and deliberate stigma are all common policy tools. The economist Richard Zeckhauser of Harvard defines ordeals as “burdens placed on individuals which yield no benefits to others” and argues that such burdens can sometimes be an effective way of ensuring scarce benefits are targeted only to worthy recipients.

But do these ordeals really select the most deserving? Carolyn Heinrich, professor of public policy at Vanderbilt University, has studied South Africa’s Child Support Grant, with a series of bureaucratic ordeals requiring bewildering paperwork and long waits. The families who struggle with these ordeals are those who face longer journeys to the benefits office, or have a limited grasp of bureaucratese.

Heinrich found that because of these arbitrary distinctions, many families received less support than they were entitled to. Most interruptions to benefit payments were errors, and the children in the affected families would become adolescents who were more likely to engage in crime, alcohol abuse or risky sexual behaviour. The ordeal harmed the innocent, undermined the goals of the support grant and seems unlikely to have saved public funds.

Some ordeals are the result of incompetence, such as badly designed forms, or underfunded public services…(More)”.

The Global Coalition for SDG Syntheses

Curated on April 30, 2023May 3, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “The SDG Synthesis Coalition is an initiative spearheaded by UNDP and UNICEF bringing together 39 United Nations entities, bilateral and multilateral organizations, global evaluation networks, evidence synthesis collaborations, CSOs and the private sector to generate syntheses organized around the five Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) pillars (people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership), to identify lessons for accelerating the achievement of development results based on global evaluative evidence…(More)”.

Gaming Public Opinion

Curated on April 29, 2023May 3, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Albert Zhang , Tilla Hoja & Jasmine Latimore: “The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) embrace of large-scale online influence operations and spreading of disinformation on Western social-media platforms has escalated since the first major attribution from Silicon Valley companies in 2019. While Chinese public diplomacy may have shifted to a softer tone in 2023 after many years of wolf-warrior online rhetoric, the Chinese Government continues to conduct global covert cyber-enabled influence operations. Those operations are now more frequent, increasingly sophisticated and increasingly effective in supporting the CCP’s strategic goals. They focus on disrupting the domestic, foreign, security and defence policies of foreign countries, and most of all they target democracies.

Currently—in targeted democracies—most political leaders, policymakers, businesses, civil society groups and publics have little understanding of how the CCP currently engages in clandestine activities online in their countries, even though this activity is escalating and evolving quickly. The stakes are high for democracies, given the indispensability of the internet and their reliance on open online spaces, free from interference. Despite years of monitoring covert CCP cyber-enabled influence operations by social-media platforms, governments, and research institutes such as ASPI, definitive public attribution of the actors driving these activities is rare. Covert online operations, by design, are difficult to detect and attribute to state actors.

Social-media platforms and governments struggle to devote adequate resources to identifying, preventing and deterring increasing levels of malicious activity, and sometimes they don’t want to name and shame the Chinese Government for political, economic and/or commercial reasons…(More)”.

What Makes People Act on Climate Change, according to Behavioral Science

Curated on April 27, 2023April 27, 2023 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Andrea Thompson: “As the world hurtles toward a future with temperatures above the thresholds scientists say will lead to the worst climate disruptions, humanity needs to take all the actions it can—collectively and as individuals—to bring planet-warming emissions down as quickly as possible. Governments and companies need to do the lion’s share of the work, but ordinary people will also need to make changes in their everyday lives. A crucial question has been how best to spur people toward more climate-friendly behaviors, such as taking the bus instead of driving or reducing home energy use.

New research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA pooled the results of 430 individual studies that examined environment-related behaviors such as recycling or choosing a mode of transportation—and that looked into changing those behaviors through several interventions, including financial incentives and educational campaigns. The authors analyzed how six different types of interventions compared with one another in their ability to influence real-world behavior and at how five behaviors compared in terms of how easy they were to change.

As can be seen in the graphic below, financial incentives and social pressure worked better at changing behaviors than did education or feedback (for example, reports of one’s own electricity use). The results reinforced what environmental psychologists have found when looking at these interventions in isolation…(More)”.