A Strong Global Framework Requires Robust Data Foundations First
In a world where we now inhabit a "Digital Earth", technology plays a pivotal role in understanding and managing our environment. This is particularly important in the face of global change, where digital tools can help communities prepare for, navigate through, and recover from natural and man-made disasters.
Storytelling, a powerful tool for transmitting academic knowledge into mainstream society, is being harnessed to share data, photos, videos, and sounds within a digital medium known as the "story map". This new medium offers assistance in telling a specific and compelling story, enabling scientists to resonate with the public and empower action.
One such initiative is the story map created by the Smithsonian Institution, which depicts human influence on the planet and innovations promoting sustainability. Similarly, the National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative measures physical, chemical, biological, and geological variables throughout the depths of the ocean, providing valuable data for climate science and ecology.
The Global Earth Observation System of Systems, meanwhile, provides petabytes of environmental data from space-borne, airborne, and in situ sensors. This data is crucial for resilience studies, helping us anticipate and mitigate infrastructure impacts of extreme weather.
However, for digital tools to be of societal value, they must be more than just data repositories. They must be tagged, analysed, made available in a user-friendly format, and open to application by others. This is where the principles of true local ownership and governance, robust, adaptive technology infrastructure, and integration of resilience and cybersecurity come into play.
True local ownership and governance embed local institutional capacity and financing mechanisms, fostering collaboration and legitimacy in the ecosystem. Robust, adaptive technology infrastructure employs technologies such as AI for predictive analytics, IoT sensors for real-time monitoring, and digital twins for virtual scenario testing. Integration of resilience and cybersecurity ensures digital tools are secure, robust, and can continuously operate even under cyber threats.
These principles address the environmental, social, and technical dimensions needed for digital tools to be resilient and valuable for understanding and responding to global change. They are particularly important in low-resource contexts, where local ownership avoids fragmentation and duplication while building sustainability, relevance, and adaptation to local needs.
Public-private partnerships are also key to this endeavour. Organisations such as NOAA have created cooperative research and development agreements with tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and the Open Commons Consortium. The new Research Data Alliance is fostering these partnerships to enhance data use, data quality, and the adoption of data-sharing approaches and tools.
President Obama's Climate Data Initiative, which encourages innovators to share data on climate change risks and impacts in useful ways, is another example of this collaboration. Climate science, resilience studies, and ecology should partner with industry, as the private sector often seeks to create and share knowledge toward solving environmental challenges.
Data generators should also share more than just data, including workflows, use cases, and stories, to facilitate the understanding and trust in the data and its analysis. This transparency is essential for building a Digital Earth that is not only resilient but also equitable and accessible to all.
This article is a Voices piece published in collaboration with the academic journal Elementa, based on the peer-reviewed article "Toward a digital resilience" published February 3 as part of Elementa's Avoiding Collapse special feature. It underscores the importance of digital tools in our fight against global change and the need for these tools to be resilient, sustainable, and accessible to all.
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