Description:

The potential of data, AI and related computational tools to be leveraged across use-cases including halting deforestation, monitoring air pollution in cities and preserving biodiversity has long been established in the move for environmental sustainability and conservation. However, significant concerns emerge in this context, which mirror existing inequities, and also raise a number of new economic, social and political harms. These challenges are layered, relating to the governance or lack thereof, of this data. Without access to accurate climate oriented data, our impact on the planet is only partly visible. With this foundation for misinformation, climate destructive policies continue unabated, threatening the health and wellbeing of our planet and species. Paralelly, is a lacuna on the unique experiences of marginalised communities across the globe, the most vulnerable to climate risks. Given these data realities; scholars, ethicists, human rights experts and technologists have proposed alternative data governance frameworks that push beyond compliance. The paradigm of data stewardship is cognizant not only of emerging potential harms, but foregrounds the potential societal value that may be unlocked if structures around collection and sharing of this data could enable greater agency, control and transparency around its usage and sharing. This builds on an existing body of work around Data justice, which recognizes how historical injustices and the structural inequalities intersect and are reproduced by technical systems. Thus, greater attention must be paid to equitable and responsible data governance approaches that centre communities’ rights and are aligned to environmental justice goals. Countries in the Global South have already reckoned with collective opportunities and related harms that can emerge both from personal and non-personal data. However, a gap exists in conceptualising and translating these data justice oriented approaches on ground. Applications of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, Data stewardship and other commons oriented approaches are showing promise in the context of environmental justice/climate action work. These initiatives will be the starting point for the proposed session, a panel which aims to draw from and build upon the collective findings of organisations and experts in South Asia and Southern Africa, between RIA and Aapti Institute. The project’s objective is to develop a playbook on data stewardship approaches with a focus on environmentalism. This playbook will illustrate the intellectual underpinnings and needs for the sector, analyse use cases and identify policy requirements which can support collective/community-based data governance. While the playbook will specifically focus on environmentalism and sustainability, the underlying objective is that it will provide evidence for adoption into other sectors or systems (such as Urban Governance) where there are limited examples of justice approaches to data governance.