Children and Young People’s Participation in Climate Assemblies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guide by KNOCA: “This guide draws on the experiences and advice of children, young people and adults involved in citizens’ assemblies that have taken place at national, city and community levels across nine countries, highlighting that:

  • Involving children and young people can enrich the intergenerational legitimacy and impact of climate assemblies: adult assembly members are reminded of their responsibilities to younger and future generations, and children and young people feel listened to, valued and taken seriously.
  • Involving children and young people has significant potential to strengthen the future of democracy and climate governance by enhancing democratic and climate literacy within education systems.
  • Children and young people can and should be involved in climate assemblies in different ways. Most importantly, children and young people should be involved from the very beginning of the process to ensure it reflects children and young people’s own ideas.
  • There are practical, ethical and design factors to consider when working with children and young people which can often be positively navigated by taking a child rights-based approach to the conceptualisation, design and delivery of climate assemblies…(More)”.

Under which conditions can civic monitoring be admitted as a source of evidence in courts?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Anna Berti Suman: “The ‘Sensing for Justice’ (SensJus) research project – running between 2020 and 2023 – explored how people use monitoring technologies or just their senses to gather evidence of environmental issues and claim environmental justice in a variety of fora. Among the other research lines, we looked at successful and failed cases of civic-gathered data introduced in courts. The guiding question was: what are the enabling factors and/or barriers for the introduction of civic evidence in environmental litigation?

Civic environmental monitoring is the use by ordinary people of monitoring devices (e.g., a sensor) or their bare senses (e.g., smell, hearing) to detect environmental issues. It can be regarded as a form of reaction to environmental injustices, a form of political contestation through data and even as a form of collective care. The practice is fast growing, especially thanks to the widespread availability of audio and video-recording devices in the hand of diverse publics, but also due to the increase in public literacy and concern on environmental matters.

Civic monitoring can be a powerful source of evidence for law enforcement, especially when it sheds light on official informational gaps associated with the shortages of public agencies’ resources to detect environmental wrongdoings. Both legal scholars and practitioners as well as civil society organizations and institutional actors should look at the practice and its potential applications with attention.

Among the cases explored for the SensJus project, the Formosa case, Texas, United States, stands out as it sets a key precedent: issued in June 2019, the landmark ruling found a Taiwanese petrochemical company liable for violating the US Clean Water Act, mostly on the basis of citizen-collected evidence involving volunteer observations of plastic contamination over years. The contamination could not be proven through existing data held by competent authorities because the company never filed any record of pollution. Our analysis of the case highlights some key determinants of the case’s success…(More)”.

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)”.

The Digital Economy Report 2024

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by UNCTAD: “…underscores the urgent need for environmentally sustainable and inclusive digitalization strategies.

Digital technology and infrastructure depend heavily on raw materials, and the production and disposal of more and more devices, along with growing water and energy needs are taking an increasing toll on the planet.

For example, the production and use of digital devices, data centres and information and communications technology (ICT) networks account for an estimated 6% to 12% of global electricity use.

Developing countries bear the brunt of the environmental costs of digitalization while reaping fewer benefits. They export low value-added raw materials and import high value-added devices, along with increasing digital waste. Geopolitical tensions over critical minerals, abundant in many of these countries, complicate the challenges.

The report calls for bold action from policymakers, industry leaders and consumers. It urges a global shift towards a circular digital economy, focusing on circularity by design through durable products, responsible consumption, reuse and recycling, and sustainable business models…(More)”.

Water Shortages in Latin America: How Can Behavioral Science Help?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Juan Roa Duarte: “Today in 2024, one of Latin America’s largest cities, Bogota, is facing significant challenges due to prolonged droughts exacerbated by El Niño. As reservoir levels plummet, local governments have implemented water rationing measures to manage the crisis. However, these rationing measures have remained unsuccessful after one month of implementation—in fact, water usage increased during the first week.1 But why? What solution can finally help solve this crisis?

In this article, we will explore how behavioral science can help Latin American cities mitigate their water shortages—and how, surprisingly, a method my hometown Bogota used back in the ‘90s can shed some light on this current issue. We’ll also explore some modern behavioral science strategies that can be used in parallel…(More)”

The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Renato Molina & Ivan Rudik: “What is the impact and value of hurricane forecasts? We study this question using newly-collected forecast data for major US hurricanes since 2005. We find higher wind speed forecasts increase pre-landfall protective spending, but erroneous under-forecasts increase post-landfall damage and rebuilding expenditures. Our main contribution is a new theoretically-grounded approach for estimating the marginal value of forecast improvements. We find that the average annual improvement reduced total per-hurricane costs, inclusive of unobserved protective spending, by $700,000 per county. Improvements since 2007 reduced costs by 19%, averaging $5 billion per hurricane. This exceeds the annual budget for all federal weather forecasting…(More)”.

Green Light

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google Research: “Road transportation is responsible for a significant amount of global and urban greenhouse gas emissions. It is especially problematic at city intersections where pollution can be 29 times higher than on open roads.  At intersections, half of these emissions come from traffic accelerating after stopping. While some amount of stop-and-go traffic is unavoidable, part of it is preventable through the optimization of traffic light timing configurations. To improve traffic light timing, cities need to either install costly hardware or run manual vehicle counts; both of these solutions are expensive and don’t provide all the necessary information. 

Green Light uses AI and Google Maps driving trends, with one of the strongest understandings of global road networks, to model traffic patterns and build intelligent recommendations for city traffic engineers to optimize traffic flow. Early numbers indicate a potential for up to 30% reduction in stops and 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (1). By optimizing each intersection, and coordinating between adjacent intersections, we can create waves of green lights and help cities further reduce stop-and-go traffic. Green Light is now live in 70 intersections in 12 cities, 4 continents, from Haifa, Israel to Bangalore, India to Hamburg, Germany – and in these intersections we are able to save fuel and lower emissions for up to 30M car rides monthly. Green Light reflects Google Research’s commitment to use AI to address climate change and improve millions of lives in cities around the world…(More)”

21st Century technology can boost Africa’s contribution to global biodiversity data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Wiida Fourie-Basson: “In spring in the Southern hemisphere, the natural world is on full throttle: “Flowers are blooming, insects are emerging, birds are singing, and reptiles are coming out of their winter hibernation,” wrote Pete Crowcroft, known as @possumpete on the citizen science app, iNaturalist.

Yet, despite this annual bursting forth of life, a 2023 preprint puts the continent’s contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility at a dismal 2.69%, with huge disparities between African countries…

Since its formation in 2008 as part of a graduate project at the University of California, the iNaturalist platform has evolved into one of the world’s most popular biodiversity observation platforms. Anyone, anywhere in the world, with a smartphone can download the app and start posting images and descriptions of their observations, and a large community of identifiers helps to confirm the species’ observation and label it as “research grade”.

Rebelo says iNaturalist is now used on a massive scale: “During the 2023 City Nature Challenge almost 67,000 people made nearly two million observations over four days – that is, five observations each second. Another 22,000 specialists identified 60 thousand species of animals, plants, and fungi. Few citizen science platforms are as powerful and efficient.”..

Andra Waagmeester, data scientist at Micelio in Belgium and a Wikimentor, believes the dearth of biodiversity data from Africa can be solved by combining the iNaturalist and Wikipedia communities: “They are independent communities, but there is substantial overlap between them. By overlaying the two data sets and leveraging the semantic web, we have the means to deal with the challenge.”

The need for biodiversity-related knowledge from Africa was first acknowledged by the Wiki-community during the 2018 Wikimania conference in Cape Town. The Wiki Biodiversity Project has since grown into an active global community that leverages crowd-sourced knowledge from platforms like iNaturalist…(More)”.

How Open-Source Software Empowers Nonprofits And The Global Communities They Serve

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Steve Francis: “One particular area where this challenge is evident is climate. Thousands of nonprofits strive to address the effects of a changing climate and its impact on communities worldwide. Headlines often go to big organizations doing high-profile work (planting trees, for instance) in well-known places. Money goes to large-scale commercial agriculture or new technologies — because that’s where profits are most easily made. But thousands of other communities of small farmers that aren’t as visible or profitable need help too. These communities come together to tackle a number of interrelated problems: climate, soil health and productivity, biodiversity and human health and welfare. They envision a more sustainable future.

The reality is that software is crafted to meet market needs, but these communities don’t represent a profitable market. Every major industry has its own software applications and a network of consultants to tune that software for optimal performance. A farm cooperative in less developed parts of the world seeking to maximize value for sustainably harvested produce faces very different challenges than do any of these business users. Often they need to collect and manipulate data in the field, on whatever mobile device they have, with little or no connectivity. Modern software systems are rarely designed to operate in such an environment; they assume the latest devices and continuous connectivity…(More)”.

Data governance for the ecological transition: An infrastructure perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Charlotte Ducuing: “This article uses infrastructure studies to provide a critical analysis of the European Union’s (EU) ambition to regulate data for the ecological transition. The EU’s regulatory project implicitly qualifies data as an infrastructure for a better economy and society. However, current EU law does not draw all the logical consequences derived from this qualification of data as infrastructure, which is one main reason why EU data legislation for the ecological transition may not deliver on its high political expectations. The ecological transition does not play a significant normative role in EU data legislation and is largely overlooked in the data governance literature. By drawing inferences from the qualification of data as an infrastructure more consistently, the article opens avenues for data governance that centre the ecological transition as a normative goal…(More)”.