Reading the news, it is easy to be overwhelmed with dire environmental statistics and data. Yet these numbers can disguise the serious gaps that remain in our understanding of the environment and the impact humanity is having on the natural world. Although in some respects, more data are being produced now about the environment than ever before, there is a clear need to leverage existing data to produce meaningful statistics, and a greater focus should be placed on expanding our environmental data collection and production efforts using new methods and data sources. Fortunately, some noteworthy advances have been made recently, and today, on the 51st anniversary of Earth Day, we should commit to continuing this progress.
Read MoreAllowing data, particularly big data, to be shared between the public and private sectors has significant benefits. These include improved public services, transparency and citizen engagement – not to mention the potential for driving economic opportunities and business innovation. And the private sector has an important role to play, not only in leveraging the value of government open data, but in making some of its own data open or available to the public sector through collaboration. Many of these data-driven public-private partnerships have already proven successful. For instance, Uber released their data on traffic to aid transportation planners and city officials; Statistics Canada has partnered with smart meter companies to access electricity consumption data to better understand consumption patterns; and the telecommunications company, Airtel, shared data with the World Health Organization to help combat tuberculosis in India…Yet with great potential comes great risk. Big data sharing raises pressing questions about security, privacy and consent. These questions have become even more salient in recent years, as we’ve learned more about how our data has been handled by technology companies and others.
Read MoreSDSN TReNDS participated in the 2019 Data for Good Exchange conference on September 15 at the Bloomberg World Headquarters in New York. In collaboration with UN Environment, TReNDS helped to facilitate a workshop on “Building a Digital Ecosystem for the Planet.” UN Environment’s digital ecosystem proposal is described and endorsed in the forthcoming TReNDS report, Counting on the World to Act.
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