Environmental monitoring: Expert exchange on connecting three monitoring domains

25 March 2022

Organisation :

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, ETH Zurich, Global Trade Alert

On 25 March 2022 15:00-17:00 (CET), the United Nations Environment Programme, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, ETH Zurich and the Global Trade Alert from St. Gallen University hosted an online expert exchange with researchers and specialists to dive into the benefits and obstacles of using digital technologies on environmental monitoring.

Experts shared their experiences and insights on the current state of play in environmental monitoring, described the digital technologies being applied and the mechanisms used for generating timely insights of environmental risks and environmental impact of human activities. Following this exchange, the experts discussed last mile challenges of environmental monitoring like data generation, collection, processing, and information uptake.

To conclude the session, experts were invited to wonder about the future of these monitoring efforts and the potential of digitally connecting environmental monitoring, supply chain traceability and green economy policy transparency.

The experts were:

David Dao (Founder, GainForest)
Crystal Davis (Director, Land & Carbon Lab, World Resources Institute)
Mark Mulligan (Professor of Physical & Environmental Geography, King’s College London)
Robert Guralnick (Associate Professor, University of Florida)

Meeting Agenda

15:00 - 15:10	Tour-de-table with short introductions
15:10 - 15:35	Scoping environmental monitoring
The aim of this opening session is to: Explore the purpose and scope of global environmental monitoring efforts and survey existing environmental monitoring tools; Examine the types of functions that tracking tools serve to add value to environmental observations and measurements; and Consider the inclusiveness of environmental monitoring tools. Structure: A short presentation by UNEP (5 minutes) Dive into environmental monitoring (5 minutes per expert) Each participant (5 minutes per expert) will share their understanding of the goals and scope of environmental monitoring from their own unique perspective. Their interventions will serve as the basis for a common understanding on the relevance and purposes of these monitoring tools. Some guiding questions include: What is the purpose of environmental monitoring? What are the existing international environmental monitoring framework and mandate? What are the emerging ad hoc environmental monitoring collaborations? What types of functions do environmental tracking tools serve, eg. data repository, reporting tool, communications tool. In what ways can environmental monitoring tools add value to environmental observations and measurements, eg. through verification to create datasets, interpretation to create knowledge? In what ways are we seeing automation in environmental monitoring and reporting? To what degree can environmental monitoring tools and frameworks be considered inclusive, for example in terms of connections with traditional knowledge and access to environmental information for local communities? How might inclusiveness of the environmental monitoring field be improved, particularly in the context of digital transformation?
15:35 - 16:30	Last mile challenges and attribution of environmental change to human activities
The purpose of this session is to: Consider methodologies of environmental monitoring tools, in terms of data collection and pooling, data analysis, and communication; Consider the latest state of play in environmental monitoring field, including the technological transformation and automation of environmental monitoring; Explore to what extent environmental monitoring can play a role in attributing environmental change to human activities, and the value of monitoring human activities in addition to environmental change; Consider the role for environmental monitoring in helping to differentiate natural changes from anthropogenic environmental changes, and the extent to which tools are capable of assessing natural variability; and Consider the degree to which tools are able to identify drivers behind environmental change and aggregate impacts across economic sectors, and evaluate different methodologies of doing so. Guiding questions: (Participants will have the opportunity beforehand to express their interest to focus on certain questions or raise new questions to peers in the discussion) Data generation How is environmental monitoring data acquired? Who is responsible for data generation? What are the key challenges in capturing environmental data? Are there examples of public policies or business activities that promote or disturb environmental data collection efforts? What are the limiting factors of the technology solutions employed for environmental data collection, eg. in terms of coverage of observations, quality of measurements (collection of noisy data, accuracy), performance/latency, power consumption, logistics (ease of installation and maintenance), durability (stability against temperature variation)? How can citizen science help to scale up field data collection? What are the challenges that arise from the citizen science data collection model, eg. quality assurance, sampling biases? How can coordination on data collection in the environmental monitoring community be improved? How important is integration among monitoring programmes and agencies to bring down costs and reduce redundancy? Environmental monitoring tools can often be highly collaborative in nature in terms of project inputs (data sourcing, community based data validation) and outputs (sharing source code) including open source tools for others to build on. How important is this collaboration and what factors facilitate or limit this collaboration? Data pooling and analysis What is the importance of pooling data to bring together data held by different stakeholder groups? For example, how can various data sources be complementary to each other (eg. covering different time scales, geographical scales, resolution)? What role is there for data pooling in safeguarding the independence of data? How can environmental data pooling help to identify gaps in global data coverage and capacity? How successful have capacity building efforts been to fill gaps in data and build out environmental research and environmental monitoring programmes in non-industrialised countries? How can technology solutions be used to promote more evenly distributed environmental data? Eg. satellite technology helping to provide surface information about remote and underdeveloped regions of the Earth. Who are the owners of environmental data and where does the environmental data sit? Do they make the data available and accessible? What are the barriers to open environmental data (eg. competitive advantage from proprietary data, sensitive personal information)? What are the barriers to effective integration and harmonization of monitoring data? What are the challenges in ensuring global environmental data is compatible and exchangeable (eg. costly unit conversion, variation across methodologies)? What types of solutions are envisaged to develop and apply common equivalency standards for all environmental monitoring data? How can transparency be retained on data provenance and processing steps even as disparate datasets are aggregated? Communications and information uptake How is environmental monitoring data used? Who are the end-users? What is the role of environmental monitoring tools in improving accessibility of information to target audiences and abstracting away the underlying technical data interface? What is the level of awareness of the needs of end-users, and what methods are used to engage them? To what degree are end-users currently taken into account in existing tools? Is there a need to shift from a data-centric to user-driven approach? To what extent and in what ways does environmental monitoring tool design deliberately encourage information uptake by policymakers or as part of the international process of rulemaking? What are the key technology innovations that have underpinned the information uptake? Attribution of environmental change to human activities How have human activities adding strain on the environment necessitated the development of environmental monitoring? Has this strain spurred on or otherwise shaped the field’s development? How can environmental monitoring tools help to identify the drivers behind environmental change? What are the limitations in attributing environmental change to human activities? What methods are there to identify and evaluate human attribution? What are types of methods exist to link environmental changes to their drivers? Eg. showing a correlation between the two through data overlay in spatial mapping. Is there a role for environmental monitoring in helping to differentiate natural changes from anthropogenic changes? To what extent do the current tools available help to assess to what degree changes reflect natural variability? What is the role for environmental monitoring in quantifying or predicting the impacts of human activities?
16:30 - 17:00	Conclusions and connections to other monitoring domains
Each expert will have five minutes to cover one of the following questions. First, the speaker can identify particular technological challenges that need tackling to enable improved attribution of environmental changes to human activities. The identified technical questions can inform and feed into thinking around a challenge/hackathon to be organised under the UNEP project. Second, the expert is invited to reflect on possible links to other types of monitoring, specifically in terms of supply chain traceability and tracking economic policies. The reflection can identify areas of collaboration or raise questions to supply chain monitoring and green economy policy monitoring experts. Possible connection areas include: Nature risk and supply chain resilience; human activity attribution and environmental impact of supply chain; Tech readiness, including business tools Any business alliance and standards as mechanisms that contribute to the data challenges and uptake of the environmental monitoring results Integration of environmental intelligence in economic policy agenda setting (eg. measuring progress towards political commitments and targets), policy formulation (eg. identifying risk areas of concentrated human activity combined with high environmental change), decision (eg. projecting how human activity will affect environmental change under different policy scenarios); policy intervention in particular on data to support the purposes of environmental monitoring; Tech readiness, including policy assessment tools Examples of policy intervention or desired policy intervention This will be followed by a 10-minute open discussion allowing experts to react to each other’s reflections and contributions. It is expected that the open discussion will also serve to narrow down concrete takeaways and key messages from the environmental monitoring group that can be carried into the cross-domain dialogue.

Key takeaways and areas of convergence

Experts pointed to huge amounts of environmental data being collected, highlighting a growing numbers of sensors globally and increasingly high resolution data, but pointed out a gap between these environmental observations and measurements, and success in translating this into useful information and environmental intelligence. Experts noted an important role for monitoring tools upgrading and adding value to environmental data but also a large challenge here, where a greater focus on answers and solutions is needed.
Experts also called for attention to who is driving the questions being asked, and emphasized that the monitoring community needs to seek to answer the questions being posed by those on the ground, including local and regional authorities and indigenous communities, not only by big players. In this respect, discussions also highlighted the importance of on the ground partners in monitoring efforts.
Discussions also converged around data quality, and the need for accurate data. This includes in ensuring representative data where there are gaps, essential for avoiding bias in analysis, otherwise there is a risk that the solutions that come afterward will be flawed. It also includes false information, requiring attention to provenance of data, and to ensuring credibility of monitoring tools.
Several experts characterised funding for environmental monitoring as more competitive instead of collaborative, and which has the effect of fragmenting a knowledge base and putting it in the hands of short term institutions that come and go, causing loss of information. Experts underscored the importance of longevity and stability in data collecting institutions.
In terms of solutions, the focus for many experts lay on creating a stable framework and increased capacity around data, noting that the pace of technological innovation is already moving faster than our ability to absorb it. Views differed over the approach to the mechanism required, whether centralised or decentralised.
Experts also pointed out that attribution of environmental changes to human activity should be the goal in some but not all circumstances and must be done in a discerning and sufficiently rigorous manner.