Paper by Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig: “Behavioral public policy came to the fore with the introduction of nudging, which aims to steer behavior while maintaining freedom of choice. Responding to critiques of nudging (e.g., that it does not promote agency and relies on benevolent choice architects), other behavioral policy approaches focus on empowering citizens. Here we review boosting, a behavioral policy approach that aims to foster people’s agency, self-control, and ability to make informed decisions. It is grounded in evidence from behavioral science showing that human decision making is not as notoriously flawed as the nudging approach assumes. We argue that addressing the challenges of our time—such as climate change, pandemics, and the threats to liberal democracies and human autonomy posed by digital technologies and choice architectures—calls for fostering capable and engaged citizens as a first line of response to complement slower, systemic approaches…(More)”.
National biodiversity data infrastructures: ten essential functions for science, policy, and practice
Paper by Anton Güntsch et al: “Today, at the international level, powerful data portals are available to biodiversity researchers and policymakers, offering increasingly robust computing and network capacities and capable data services for internationally agreed-on standards. These accelerate individual and complex workflows to map data-driven research processes or even to make them possible for the first time. At the national level, however, and alongside these international developments, national infrastructures are needed to take on tasks that cannot be easily funded or addressed internationally. To avoid gaps, as well as redundancies in the research landscape, national tasks and responsibilities must be clearly defined to align efforts with core priorities. In the present article, we outline 10 essential functions of national biodiversity data infrastructures. They serve as key providers, facilitators, mediators, and platforms for effective biodiversity data management, integration, and analysis that require national efforts to foster biodiversity science, policy, and practice…(More)”.
Review of relevance of the OECD Recommendation on ICTs and the Environment
OECD Policy Report: “The OECD Recommendation on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the Environment was adopted in 2010 and recognised the link between digital technologies and environmental sustainability. Today, advances in digital technologies underscore their growing role in achieving climate resilience. At the same time, digital technologies and their underlying infrastructure have an environmental footprint that must be managed. This report takes stock of technology and policy developments since the adoption of the Recommendation and provides a gap analysis and assessment of its relevance, concluding that the Recommendation remains relevant and identifying areas for revision…(More)”.
Beached Plastic Debris Index; a modern index for detecting plastics on beaches
Paper by Jenna Guffogg et al: “Plastic pollution on shorelines poses a significant threat to coastal ecosystems, underscoring the urgent need for scalable detection methods to facilitate debris removal. In this study, the Beached Plastic Debris Index (BPDI) was developed to detect plastic accumulation on beaches using shortwave infrared spectral features. To validate the BPDI, plastic targets with varying sub-pixel covers were placed on a sand spit and captured using WorldView-3 satellite imagery. The performance of the BPDI was analysed in comparison with the Normalized Difference Plastic Index (NDPI), the Plastic Index (PI), and two hydrocarbon indices (HI, HC). The BPDI successfully detected the plastic targets from sand, water, and vegetation, outperforming the other indices and identifying pixels with <30 % plastic cover. The robustness of the BPDI suggests its potential as an effective tool for mapping plastic debris accumulations along coastlines…(More)”.
We Need To Talk About Climate: How Citizens’ Assemblies Can Help Us Solve The Climate Crisis
Book by Graham Smith: “Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision-making. How might they help us address the climate crisis? The transition to net zero and climate resilient societies requires deep social and economic transformations that will have significant effects on citizens’ lives. Such a transition needs to engage the public directly. Climate assemblies show us how this can be done.
This book explains the variety of climate assemblies that have taken place so far at local, national and international levels and explains why they have captured the imagination of government and activists alike. It examines the different contexts and designs of climate assemblies and assesses their impact. Drawing lessons from current practice, the book demonstrates how assemblies can take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics and how they can have a real and lasting impact on climate policy and politics…(More)”.
The need for climate data stewardship: 10 tensions and reflections regarding climate data governance
Paper by Stefaan Verhulst: “Datafication—the increase in data generation and advancements in data analysis—offers new possibilities for governing and tackling worldwide challenges such as climate change. However, employing data in policymaking carries various risks, such as exacerbating inequalities, introducing biases, and creating gaps in access. This paper articulates 10 core tensions related to climate data and its implications for climate data governance, ranging from the diversity of data sources and stakeholders to issues of quality, access, and the balancing act between local needs and global imperatives. Through examining these tensions, the article advocates for a paradigm shift towards multi-stakeholder governance, data stewardship, and equitable data practices to harness the potential of climate data for the public good. It underscores the critical role of data stewards in navigating these challenges, fostering a responsible data ecology, and ultimately contributing to a more sustainable and just approach to climate action and broader social issues…(More)”.
Unlocking Green Deal Data: Innovative Approaches for Data Governance and Sharing in Europe
JRC Report: “Drawing upon the ambitious policy and legal framework outlined in the Europe Strategy for Data (2020) and the establishment of common European data spaces, this Science for Policy report explores innovative approaches for unlocking relevant data to achieve the objectives of the European Green Deal.
The report focuses on the governance and sharing of Green Deal data, analysing a variety of topics related to the implementation of new regulatory instruments, namely the Data Governance Act and the Data Act, as well as the roles of various actors in the data ecosystem. It provides an overview of the current incentives and disincentives for data sharing and explores the existing landscape of Data Intermediaries and Data Altruism Organizations. Additionally, it offers insights from a private sector perspective and outlines key data governance and sharing practices concerning Citizen-Generated Data (CGD).
The main conclusions build upon the concept of “Systemic Data Justice,” which emphasizes equity, accountability, and fair representation to foster stronger connections between the supply and demand of data for a more effective and sustainable data economy. Five policy recommendations outline a set of main implications and actionable points for the revision of the INSPIRE Directive (2007) within the context of the common European Green Deal data space, and toward a more sustainable and fair data ecosystem. However, the relevance of these recommendations spills over Green Deal data only, as they outline key elements to ensure that any data ecosystem is both just and impact-oriented…(More)”.
Unlocking data for climate action requires trusted marketplaces
Report by Digital Impact Alliance: “In 2024, the northern hemisphere recorded the hottest summer overall, the hottest day, and the hottest ever month of August. That same month – August 2024 – this warming fueled droughts in Italy and intensified typhoons that devastated parts of the Philippines, Taiwan, and China. The following month, new research calculated that warming is costing the global economy billions of dollars: an increase in extreme heat and severe drought costs about 0.2% of a country’s GDP.
These are only the latest stories and statistics that illustrate the growing costs of climate change – data points that have emerged in the short time since we published our second Spotlight on unlocking climate data with open transaction networks.
This third paper in the series continues the work of the Joint Learning Network on Unlocking Data for Climate Action (Climate Data JLN). This multi-disciplinary network identified multiple promising models to explore in the context of unlocking data for climate action. This Spotlight paper examines the third of these models: data spaces. Through examination of data spaces in action, the paper analyzes the key elements that render them more or less applicable to specific climate-related data sets. Data spaces are relatively new and mostly conceptual, with only a handful of implementations in process and concentrated in a few geographic areas. While this model requires extensive up-front work to agree upon governance and technical standards, the result is an approach that overcomes trust and financing issues by maintaining data sovereignty and creating a marketplace for data exchange…(More)”.
Nature-rich nations push for biodata payout
Article by Lee Harris: “Before the current generation of weight-loss drugs, there was hoodia, a cactus that grows in southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert, and which members of the region’s San tribe have long used to stave off hunger. UK-based Phytopharm licensed the active ingredient in the cactus in 1996, and made numerous attempts to commercialise weight-loss products derived from it.
The company won licensing deals with Pfizer and Unilever, but drew outrage from campaigners who argued that the country was ripping off indigenous groups that had made the discovery. Indignation grew after the chief executive said it could not compensate local tribes because “the people who discovered the plant have disappeared”. (They had not).
This is just one example of companies using biological resources discovered in other countries for financial gain. The UN has attempted to set fairer terms with treaties such as the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, which deals with the sharing of genetic resources. But this approach has been seen by many developing countries as unsatisfactory. And earlier tools governing trade in plants and microbes may become less useful as biological data is now frequently transmitted in the form of so-called digital sequence information — the genetic code derived from those physical resources.
Now, the UN is working on a fund to pay stewards of biodiversity — notably communities in lower-income countries — for discoveries made with genetic data from their ecosystems. The mechanism was established in 2022 as part of the Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, a sister process to the climate “COP” initiative. But the question of how it will be governed and funded will be on the table at the October COP16 summit in Cali, Colombia.
If such a fund comes to fruition — a big “if” — it could raise billions for biodiversity goals. The sectors that depend on this genetic data — notably, pharmaceuticals, biotech and agribusiness — generate revenues exceeding $1tn annually, and African countries plan to push for these sectors to contribute 1 per cent of all global retail sales to the fund, according to Bloomberg.
There’s reason to temper expectations, however. Such a fund would lack the power to compel national governments or industries to pay up. Instead, the strategy is focused around raising ambition — and public pressure — for key industries to make voluntary contributions…(More)”.
Discounting the Future: The Ascendency of a Political Technology
Book by Liliana Doganova: “Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Liliana Doganova’s book sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.
Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalization of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain…(More)”