Constructing Valid Geospatial Tools for Environmental Justice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Decades of research have shown that the most disadvantaged communities exist at the intersection of high levels of hazard exposure, racial and ethnic marginalization, and poverty.

Mapping and geographical information systems have been crucial for analyzing the environmental burdens of marginalized communities, and several federal and state geospatial tools have emerged to help address environmental justice concerns — such as the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool developed in 2022 in response to Justice40 initiatives from the Biden administration.

Constructing Valid Geospatial Tools for Environmental Justice, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, offers recommendations for developing environmental justice tools that reflect the experiences of the communities they measure.

The report recommends data strategies focused on community engagement, validation, and documentation. It emphasizes using a structured development process and offers guidance for selecting and assessing indicators, integrating indicators, and incorporating cumulative impact scoring. Tool developers should choose measures of economic burden beyond the federal poverty level that account for additional dimensions of wealth and geographic variations in cost of living. They should also use indicators that measure the impacts of racism in policies and practices that have led to current disparities…(More)”.

Civic Monitoring for Environmental Law Enforcement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Anna Berti Suman: “This book presents a thought-provoking inquiry demonstrating how civic environmental monitoring can support law enforcement. It provides an in-depth analysis of applicable legal frameworks and conventions such as the Aarhus Convention, with an enlightening discussion on the civic right to contribute environmental information.

Civic Monitoring for Environmental Law Enforcement discusses multi- and interdisciplinary research into how civil society uses monitoring techniques to gather evidence of environmental issues. The book argues that civic monitoring is a constructive approach for finding evidence of environmental wrongdoings and for leveraging this evidence in different institutional fora, including judicial proceedings and official reporting for environmental protection agencies. It also reveals the challenges and implications associated with a greater reliance on civic monitoring practices by institutions and society at large.

Adopting original methodological approaches to drive inspiration for further research, this book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of environmental governance and regulation, environmental law, politics and policy, and science and technology studies. It is also beneficial to civil society actors, civic initiatives, legal practitioners, and policymakers working in institutions engaged in the application of environmental law…(More)”

Visualization for Public Involvement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Visualization methods have long been integral to the public involvement process for transportation planning and project development. From well-established methods such as conceptual sketches or photo simulations to the latest immersive technologies, state departments of transportation (DOTs) recognize that visualizations can significantly increase public understanding of a project’s appearance and physical impacts. Emerging methods such as interactive three-dimensional environments, virtual reality, and augmented reality can dramatically enhance public understanding of transportation options and design concepts…(More)”.

Future-proofing government data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Amy Jones: “Vast amounts of data are fueling innovation and decision-making, and agencies representing the United States government are custodian to some of the largest repositories of data in the world. As one of the world’s largest data creators and consumers, the federal government has made substantial investments in sourcing, curating, and leveraging data across many domains. However, the increasing reliance on artificial intelligence to extract insights and drive efficiencies necessitates a strategic pivot: agencies must evolve data management practices to identify and discriminate synthetic data from organic sources to safeguard the integrity and utility of data assets.

AI’s transformative potential is contingent on the availability of high-quality data. Data readiness includes attention to quality, accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness and relevance, at a minimum, and agencies are adopting robust data governance frameworks that enforce data quality standards at every stage of the data lifecycle. This includes implementing advanced data validation techniques, fostering a culture of data stewardship, and leveraging state-of-the-art tools for continuous data quality monitoring…(More)”.

Supporting Scientific Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Lisa Margonelli: “What do nuclear fusion power plants, artificial intelligence, hydrogen infrastructure, and drinking water recycled from human waste have in common? Aside from being featured in this edition of Issues, they all require intense public engagement to choose among technological tradeoffs, safety profiles, and economic configurations. Reaching these understandings requires researchers, engineers, and decisionmakers who are adept at working with the public. It also requires citizens who want to engage with such questions and can articulate what they want from science and technology.

This issue offers a glimpse into what these future collaborations might look like. To train engineers with the “deep appreciation of the social, cultural, and ethical priorities and implications of the technological solutions engineers are tasked with designing and deploying,” University of Michigan nuclear engineer Aditi Verma and coauthors Katie Snyder and Shanna Daly asked their first-year engineering students to codesign nuclear power plants in collaboration with local community members. Although traditional nuclear engineering classes avoid “getting messy,” Verma and colleagues wanted students to engage honestly with the uncertainties of the profession. In the process of working with communities, the students’ vocabulary changed; they spoke of trust, respect, and “love” for community—even when considering deep geological waste repositories…(More)”.

Citizens should be asked to do more

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Martin Wolf: “In an excellent “Citizens’ White Paper”, in partnership with participation charity Involve, Demos describes the needed revolution as follows, “We don’t just need new policies for these challenging times. We need new ways to tackle the policy challenges we face — from national missions to everyday policymaking. We need new ways to understand and negotiate what the public will tolerate. We need new ways to build back trust in politicians”. In sum, it states, “if government wants to be trusted by the people, it must itself start to trust the people.”

Bar chart of agreement that public should be involved in decision making on these issues (%) showing the public has clear ideas on where it should be most involved

The fundamental aim is to change the perception of government from something that politicians and bureaucrats do to us into an activity that involves not everyone, which is impossible, but ordinary people selected by lot. This, as I have noted, would be the principle of the jury imported into public life.

How might this work? The idea is to select representative groups of ordinary people affected by policies into official discussion on problems and solutions. This could be at the level of central, devolved or local government. The participants would not just be asked for opinions, but be actively engaged in considering issues and shaping (though not making) decisions upon them. The paper details a number of different approaches — panels, assemblies, juries, workshops and wider community conversations. Which would be appropriate would depend on the task…(More)”.

Policy fit for the future: the Australian Government Futures primer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Primer by Will Hartigan and Arthur Horobin: “Futures is a systematic exploration of probable, possible and preferable future developments to inform present-day policy, strategy and decision-making. It uses multiple plausible scenarios of the future to anticipate and make sense of disruptive change. It is also known as strategic foresight...

This primer provides an overview of Futures methodologies and their practical application to policy development and advice. It is a first step for policy teams and officers interested in Futures: providing you with a range of flexible tools, ideas and advice you can adapt to your own policy challenges and environments.

This primer was developed by the Policy Projects and Taskforce Office in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. We have drawn on expertise from inside and outside of government –including through our project partners, the Futures Hub at the National Security College in the Australian National University. 

This primer has been written by policy officers, for policy officers –with a focus on practical and tested approaches that can support you to create policy fit for the future…(More)”.

AI mass surveillance at Paris Olympics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Anne Toomey McKenna: “The 2024 Paris Olympics is drawing the eyes of the world as thousands of athletes and support personnel and hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe converge in France. It’s not just the eyes of the world that will be watching. Artificial intelligence systems will be watching, too.

Government and private companies will be using advanced AI tools and other surveillance tech to conduct pervasive and persistent surveillance before, during and after the Games. The Olympic world stage and international crowds pose increased security risks so significant that in recent years authorities and critics have described the Olympics as the “world’s largest security operations outside of war.”

The French government, hand in hand with the private tech sector, has harnessed that legitimate need for increased security as grounds to deploy technologically advanced surveillance and data gathering tools. Its surveillance plans to meet those risks, including controversial use of experimental AI video surveillance, are so extensive that the country had to change its laws to make the planned surveillance legal.

The plan goes beyond new AI video surveillance systems. According to news reports, the prime minister’s office has negotiated a provisional decree that is classified to permit the government to significantly ramp up traditional, surreptitious surveillance and information gathering tools for the duration of the Games. These include wiretapping; collecting geolocation, communications and computer data; and capturing greater amounts of visual and audio data…(More)”.

Governance of deliberative mini-publics: emerging consensus and divergent views

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lucy J. Parry, , Nicole Curato, and , and John S. Dryzek: “Deliberative mini-publics are forums for citizen deliberation composed of randomly selected citizens convened to yield policy recommendations. These forums have proliferated in recent years but there are no generally accepted standards to govern their practice. Should there be? We answer this question by bringing the scholarly literature on citizen deliberation into dialogue with the lived experience of the people who study, design and implement mini-publics. We use Q methodology to locate five distinct perspectives on the integrity of mini-publics, and map the structure of agreement and dispute across them. We find that, across the five viewpoints, there is emerging consensus as well as divergence on integrity issues, with disagreement over what might be gained or lost by adapting common standards of practice, and possible sources of integrity risks. This article provides an empirical foundation for further discussion on integrity standards in the future…(More)”.

Reliability of U.S. Economic Data Is in Jeopardy, Study Finds

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ben Casselman: “A report says new approaches and increased spending are needed to ensure that government statistics remain dependable and free of political influence.

Federal Reserve officials use government data to help determine when to raise or lower interest rates. Congress and the White House use it to decide when to extend jobless benefits or send out stimulus payments. Investors place billions of dollars worth of bets that are tied to monthly reports on job growth, inflation and retail sales.

But a new study says the integrity of that data is in increasing jeopardy.

The report, issued on Tuesday by the American Statistical Association, concludes that government statistics are reliable right now. But that could soon change, the study warns, citing factors including shrinking budgets, falling survey response rates and the potential for political interference.

The authors — statisticians from George Mason University, the Urban Institute and other institutions — likened the statistical system to physical infrastructure like highways and bridges: vital, but often ignored until something goes wrong.

“We do identify this sort of downward spiral as a threat, and that’s what we’re trying to counter,” said Nancy Potok, who served as chief statistician of the United States from 2017 to 2019 and was one of the report’s authors. “We’re not there yet, but if we don’t do something, that threat could become a reality, and in the not-too-distant future.”

The report, “The Nation’s Data at Risk,” highlights the threats facing statistics produced across the federal government, including data on education, health, crime and demographic trends.

But the risks to economic data are particularly notable because of the attention it receives from policymakers and investors. Most of that data is based on surveys of households or businesses. And response rates to government surveys have plummeted in recent years, as they have for private polls. The response rate to the Current Population Survey — the monthly survey of about 60,000 households that is the basis for the unemployment rate and other labor force statistics — has fallen to about 70 percent in recent months, from nearly 90 percent a decade ago…(More)”.