More Companies Are Disclosing Their ESG Data, but Confusion on How Persists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by David Breg: “Public companies in the U.S. are increasingly disclosing sustainability information, but many say they find it a challenge to report fundamental climate data that many regulators around the globe likely will require under incoming mandatory reporting standards. 

Nearly two-thirds of respondents said their company was disclosing environmental, social and governance information, up from 56% in the prior year, according to the annual survey of sustainability officials that WSJ Pro conducted this spring.

However, there was little consensus on which framework to use and respondents highlighted three fundamental types of information as their three biggest environmental reporting challenges: Greenhouse-gas emissions, climate-change risk and energy management.

The proportion of companies disclosing sustainability and ESG information was 63%, up from 56% last year. Those that don’t yet report this data but plan to was 16%, down from 25% last year. About one-fifth of respondents said their organization had no plans to report their progress, virtually unchanged from last year. Breaking that down, a quarter of private companies don’t plan any ESG reporting, while only 7% of public companies felt the same.

Regulators around the globe are finalizing rules that would require companies to publish standardized information after years of patchy voluntary ESG reporting based on a host of frameworks. California’s governor has said he would soon sign that state’s requirements into law. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules are expected later this year. European regulations are already in place and many other countries are also working on standards. The International Sustainability Standards Board hopes its climate framework, completed this past summer, becomes the global baseline. 

While it is mostly public companies that face mandatory requirements, even private businesses face increased scrutiny of their sustainability and ESG policies from stakeholders including shareholders, eco-conscious consumers, suppliers, insurers and lenders…(More)”.

Surveys Provide Insight Into Three Factors That Encourage Open Data and Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Joshua Borycz, Alison Specht and Kevin Crowston: “Open Science is a game changer for researchers and the research community. The UNESCO Open Science recommendations in 2021 suggest that the practice of Open Science is a win-win for researchers as they gain from others’ work while making contributions, which in turn benefits the community, as transparency of conclusions and hence confidence in new knowledge improves.

Over a 10-year period Carol Tenopir of DataONE and her team conducted a global survey of scientists, managers and government workers involved in broad environmental science activities about their willingness to share data and their opinion of the resources available to do so (Tenopir et al., 2011, 2015, 2018, 2020). Comparing the responses over that time shows a general increase in the willingness to share data (and thus engage in open science).

A higher willingness to share data corresponded with a decrease in satisfaction with data sharing resources across nations.

The most surprising result was that a higher willingness to share data corresponded with a decrease in satisfaction with data sharing resources across nations (e.g., skills, tools, training) (Fig.1). That is, researchers who did not want to share data were satisfied with the available resources, and those that did want to share data were dissatisfied. Researchers appear to only discover that the tools are insufficient when they begin the hard work of engaging in open science practices. This indicates that a cultural shift in the attitudes of researchers needs to precede the development of support and tools for data management…(More)”.

Picture of a graph showing the correlation between the factors of willingness to share and satisfaction with resources for data sharing for six groups of nations.
Fig.1: Correlation between the factors of willingness to share and satisfaction with resources for data sharing for six groups of nations.

Doing more good: three trends tech companies should consider in supporting humanitarian response

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jessie End: “On 6 February 2023, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, leaving at least 56,000 dead and more than 20 million impacted. Since April, renewed conflict in Sudan has left hundreds of thousands displaced. Ukraine. COVID. Contemplating an increasingly complex and besieged humanitarian landscape, I asked our partners: how can the technology sector better meet these growing needs?

To mark World Humanitarian Day last month, here are three trends with which tech companies can align to ensure our work is doing the most good…

Climate change has been in the public narrative for decades. For much of that time it was the territory of environmental nonprofits. Today, it is recognised as an intersectional issue impacting the work of every humanitarian organisation. The effects of climate change on food security, livelihoods, migration and conflict requires organisations such as Mercy Corps and the International Committee of the Red Cross to incorporate mitigation, resilience and climate-savvy response across their programs.

Early warning systems (EWS) are a promising development in this area, and one well-aligned with the expertise of the tech sector. An effective climate early warning system addresses the complex network of factors contributing to and resulting from climate change. It provides event detection, analysis, prediction, communication and decision-making tools. An effective EWS includes the communities and sectors most at risk, incorporating all relevant risk factors, from geography to social vulnerabilities.

There are many ways for tech firms to engage with this work. Companies working on remote sensing technologies improve risk detection, as well as provide predictive modeling. Dataminr’s own AI platform detects the earliest signals of high-impact events and emerging risks from within publicly available data, including environmental sensors. Market insight platforms can lend their strengths to participatory mapping and data collection for climate risk analysis. And two-way, geolocated messaging can help with targeted dissemination of warnings to impacted communities, as well as with coordinating response efforts.

The key to success is integration. No single tech company can address all parts of a robust EWS, but working together and with partners like MIT’s CREWSnet we can build seamless systems that help humanitarian partners protect the lives and livelihoods of the world’s most vulnerable…(More)”.

AI and the next great tech shift

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book review by John Thornhill: “When the South Korean political activist Kim Dae-jung was jailed for two years in the early 1980s, he powered his way through some 600 books in his prison cell, such was his thirst for knowledge. One book that left a lasting impression was The Third Wave by the renowned futurist Alvin Toffler, who argued that an imminent information revolution was about to transform the world as profoundly as the preceding agricultural and industrial revolutions.

“Yes, this is it!” Kim reportedly exclaimed. When later elected president, Kim referred to the book many times in his drive to turn South Korea into a technological powerhouse.

Forty-three years after the publication of Toffler’s book, another work of sweeping futurism has appeared with a similar theme and a similar name. Although the stock in trade of futurologists is to highlight the transformational and the unprecedented, it is remarkable how much of their output appears the same.

The chief difference is that The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman focuses more narrowly on the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. But the author would surely be delighted if his book were to prove as influential as Toffler’s in prompting politicians to action.

As one of the three co-founders of DeepMind, the London-based AI research company founded in 2010, and now chief executive of the AI start-up Inflection, Suleyman has been at the forefront of the industry for more than a decade. The Coming Wave bristles with breathtaking excitement about the extraordinary possibilities that the revolutions in AI and synthetic biology could bring about.

AI, we are told, could unlock the secrets of the universe, cure diseases and stretch the bounds of imagination. Biotechnology can enable us to engineer life and transform agriculture. “Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen,” he writes.

But what is striking about Suleyman’s heavily promoted book is how the optimism of his will is overwhelmed by the pessimism of his intellect, to borrow a phrase from the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. For most of history, the challenge of technology has been to unleash its power, Suleyman writes. Now the challenge has flipped.

In the 21st century, the dilemma will be how to contain technology’s power given the capabilities of these new technologies have exploded and the costs of developing them have collapsed. “Containment is not, on the face of it, possible. And yet for all our sakes, containment must be possible,” he writes…(More)”.

Unlocking AI’s Potential for Everyone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Diane Coyle: “…But while some policymakers do have deep knowledge about AI, their expertise tends to be narrow, and most other decision-makers simply do not understand the issue well enough to craft sensible policies. Owing to this relatively low knowledge base and the inevitable asymmetry of information between regulators and regulated, policy responses to specific issues are likely to remain inadequate, heavily influenced by lobbying, or highly contested.

So, what is to be done? Perhaps the best option is to pursue more of a principles-based policy. This approach has already gained momentum in the context of issues like misinformation and trolling, where many experts and advocates believe that Big Tech companies should have a general duty of care (meaning a default orientation toward caution and harm reduction).

In some countries, similar principles already apply to news broadcasters, who are obligated to pursue accuracy and maintain impartiality. Although enforcement in these domains can be challenging, the upshot is that we do already have a legal basis for eliciting less socially damaging behavior from technology providers.

When it comes to competition and market dominance, telecoms regulation offers a serviceable model with its principle of interoperability. People with competing service providers can still call each other because telecom companies are all required to adhere to common technical standards and reciprocity agreements. The same is true of ATMs: you may incur a fee, but you can still withdraw cash from a machine at any bank.

In the case of digital platforms, a lack of interoperability has generally been established by design, as a means of locking in users and creating “moats.” This is why policy discussions about improving data access and ensuring access to predictable APIs have failed to make any progress. But there is no technical reason why some interoperability could not be engineered back in. After all, Big Tech companies do not seem to have much trouble integrating the new services that they acquire when they take over competitors.

In the case of LLMs, interoperability probably could not apply at the level of the models themselves, since not even their creators understand their inner workings. However, it can and should apply to interactions between LLMs and other services, such as cloud platforms…(More)”.

City CIOs urged to lay the foundations for generative AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sarah Wray: “The London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) has produced a collection of guides to support local authorities in using generative artificial intelligence (genAI) tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney and Dall-E.

The resources include a guide for local authority leaders and another aimed at all staff, as well as a guide designed specifically for council Chief Information Officers (CIOs), which was developed with AI software company Faculty.

Sam Nutt, Researcher and Data Ethicist at LOTI, a membership organisation for over 20 boroughs and the Greater London Authority, told Cities Today: “Generative AI won’t solve every problem for local governments, but it could be a catalyst to transform so many processes for how we work.

“On the one hand, personal assistants integrated into programmes like Word, Excel or Powerpoint could massively improve officer productivity. On another level there is a chance to reimagine services and government entirely, thinking about how gen AI models can do so many tasks with data that we couldn’t do before, and allow officers to completely change how they spend their time.

“There are both opportunities and challenges, but the key message on both is that local governments should be ambitious in using this ‘AI moment’ to reimagine and redesign our ways of working to be better at delivering services now and in the future for our residents.”

As an initial step, local governments are advised to provide training and guidelines for staff. Some have begun to implement these steps, including US cities such as Boston, Seattle and San Jose.

Nutt stressed that generative AI policies are useful but not a silver bullet for governance and that they will need to be revisited and updated regularly as technology and regulations evolve…(More)”.

AI often mangles African languages. Local scientists and volunteers are taking it back to school

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sandeep Ravindran: “Imagine joyfully announcing to your Facebook friends that your wife gave birth, and having Facebook automatically translate your words to “my prostitute gave birth.” Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Porto, says that’s what happened to a friend when Facebook’s English translation mangled the nativity news he shared in his native language, Hausa.

Such errors in artificial intelligence (AI) translation are common with African languages. AI may be increasingly ubiquitous, but if you’re from the Global South, it probably doesn’t speak your language.

That means Google Translate isn’t much help, and speech recognition tools such as Siri or Alexa can’t understand you. All of these services rely on a field of AI known as natural language processing (NLP), which allows AI to “understand” a language. The overwhelming majority of the world’s 7000 or so languages lack data, tools, or techniques for NLP, making them “low-resourced,” in contrast with a handful of “high-resourced” languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, and Chinese.

Hausa is the second most spoken African language, with an estimated 60 million to 80 million speakers, and it’s just one of more than 2000 African languages that are mostly absent from AI research and products. The few products available don’t work as well as those for English, notes Graham Neubig, an NLP researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s not the people who speak the languages making the technology.” More often the technology simply doesn’t exist. “For example, now you cannot talk to Siri in Hausa, because there is no data set to train Siri,” Muhammad says.

He is trying to fill that gap with a project he co-founded called HausaNLP, one of several launched within the past few years to develop AI tools for African languages…(More)”.

Wastewater monitoring: ‘the James Webb Telescope for population health’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Exemplars News: “When the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a lockdown across Bangladesh and her research on environmental exposure to heavy metals became impossible to continue, Dr. Rehnuma Haque began a search for some way she could contribute to the pandemic response.

“I knew I had to do something during COVID,” said Dr. Haque, a research scientist at the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). “I couldn’t just sit at home.”

Then she stumbled upon articles on early wastewater monitoring efforts for COVID in Australia, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United States. “When I read those papers, I was so excited,” said Dr. Haque. “I emailed my supervisor, Dr. Mahbubur Rahman, and said, ‘Can we do this?’”

Two months later, in June 2020, Dr. Haque and her colleagues had launched one of the most robust and earliest national wastewater surveillance programs for COVID in a low- or middle-income country (LMIC).

The initiative, which has now been expanded to monitor for cholera, salmonella, and rotavirus and may soon be expanded further to monitor for norovirus and antibiotic resistance, demonstrates the power and potential of wastewater surveillance to serve as a low-cost tool for obtaining real-time meaningful health data at scale to identify emerging risks and guide public health responses.

“It is improving public health outcomes,” said Dr. Haque. “We can see everything going on in the community through wastewater surveillance. You can find everything you are looking for and then prepare a response.”

A single wastewater sample can yield representative data about an entire ward, town, or county and allow LMICs to monitor for emerging pathogens. Compared with clinical monitoring, wastewater monitoring is easier and cheaper to collect, can capture infections that are asymptomatic or before symptoms arise, raises fewer ethical concerns, can be more inclusive and not as prone to sampling biases, can generate a broader range of data, and is unrivaled at quickly generating population-level data…(More)” – See also: The #Data4Covid19 Review

The planet is too important to be left to activists: The guiding philosophy of the Climate Majority Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jadzia Tedeschi and Rupert Read: “Increasing numbers of people around the world are convinced that human civilisation is teetering on the brink, but that our political “leaders” aren’t levelling with us about just how dire the climate outlook is. Quite a few of us are beginning to imagine collapse. And yet, for the most part, the responses available to individuals who want to take action seem to be limited to either consumer choices (minimising the amount of plastics we buy, using reusable coffee cups, recycling, and so on) or radical protests (such as gluing oneself to roads at busy intersections, disrupting sports matches, splashing soup on priceless art works, and risking imprisonment).

But there must be a space for action between these two alternatives. While the radical tactics of the Extinction Rebellion movement (XR) did succeed in nudging the public conversation concerning the climate and biodiversity crisis toward a new degree of seriousness, these same tactics also alienated people who would otherwise be sympathetic to XR’s cause and managed to give “climate activists” a bad name in the process. To put it simply, the radical tactics of XR could never achieve the kind of broad-based consensus that is needed to meaningfully respond to the current crisis.

We need a coordinated, collective effort at scale, which entails collaborating across social boundaries and political battlelines. If we are to prevent irrecoverable civilisational collapse, we need to demonstrate that taking care of the natural world is in everybody’s interest.

The Climate Majority Project works to inspire, fund, connect, coordinate, and scale citizen-led initiatives in workplaces, local communities, and strategic professional networks to reach beyond the boundaries of activism-as-usual. It is our endeavour to instantiate the kind of ambitious, moderate flank to XR that Rupert Read has previously called for. The plan is to prove the concept in the UK and then go global — albeit at a slower pace; after all, moderation is rarely adorned with fireworks…(More)”.

The danger of building strong narratives on weak data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by John Burn-Murdoch: “Measuring gross domestic product is extremely complicated. Around the world, national statistics offices are struggling to get the sums right the first time around.

Some struggle more than others. When Ireland first reported its estimate for GDP growth in Q1 2015, it came in at 1.4 per cent. One year later, and with some fairly unique distortions due to its location as headquarters for many US big tech and pharma companies, this was revised upwards to an eye-watering 21.4 per cent.

On average, five years after an estimate of quarterly Irish GDP growth is first published, the latest revision of that figure is two full percentage points off the original value. The equivalent for the UK is almost 10 times smaller at 0.25 percentage points, making the ONS’s initial estimates among the most accurate in the developed world, narrowly ahead of the US at 0.26 and well ahead of the likes of Japan (0.46) and Norway (0.56).

But it’s not just the size of revisions that matters, it’s the direction. Out of 24 developed countries that consistently report quarterly GDP revisions to the OECD, the UK’s initial estimates are the most pessimistic. Britain’s quarterly growth figures typically end up 0.15 percentage points higher than first thought. The Germans go up by 0.07 on average, the French by 0.04, while the Americans, ever optimistic, typically end up revising their estimates down by 0.11 percentage points.

In other words, next time you hear a set of quarterly growth figures, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to mentally add 0.15 to the UK one and subtract 0.11 from the US.

This may all sound like nerdy detail, but it matters because people graft strong narratives on to this remarkably flimsy data. Britain was the only G7 economy yet to rebound past pre-Covid levels until it wasn’t. Ireland is booming, apparently, except its actual individual consumption per capita — a much better measure of living standards than GDP — has fallen steadily from just above the western European average in 2007 to 10 per cent below last year.

And the phenomenon is not exclusive to economic data. Two years ago, progressives critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic took to calling the UK “Plague Island”, citing Britain’s reported Covid death rates, which were among the highest in the developed world. But with the benefit of hindsight, we know that Britain was simply better at counting its deaths than most countries…(More)”