Technology for Environmental Impact

How do I test, adapt, scale, and track the impact of a tech intervention for long-term success?

In this lesson, we’ll look at what needs to be considered over the lifetime of a tech intervention. How will the tech scale and last?  How will it be retired? What is the tech’s long-term future?  

In the previous lessons, we explored ways to anticipate risks, ethical challenges, and unintended consequences.  But any intervention, no matter how thoughtfully planned, will need to adapt as the world around it changes. There’s no way we can foresee and design for every possible eventuality.  The key to successful long-term projects is to build a plan that can evolve and grow over time, to account for new threats, unintended consequences, or opportunities that appear.  We’ll use examples of adaptive management to explore how conservation interventions can flexibly respond to changing conditions. 

Finally, we’ll invite you to dream big as you imagine the impact of your intervention: building a powerful tool is a great start, but how can you scale this initiative to grow into something much bigger?  How can your technology help drive a larger movement that changes the landscape of conservation tech? 

By completing this lesson, you will:

• Explore examples of risks and unintended consequences that conservation tech interventions faced, and analyze how successful projects have accounted for these by adapting or pivoting their designs.  
• Build a flexible plan for how you’ll roll out your tech and scale its impact over time.
• Dream big to imagine the long-term future of your tech, and how it might be a catalyst for changes that extend beyond what you and your team can achieve on your own.

Pre-Reading

• Composite Case: Addressing risks of tracking wildlife. These articles offer a preview of the sorts of risks you need to watch out for as your project grows, and some examples of how organizations have taken accountability and iterated in the face of these risks. Not doing so could lead to disastrous consequences, where tech exacerbates the problem it’s intended to solve. 
  • The dark side of digitally tracking endangered species and Tracking Wildlife for Science Could Actually Help Poachers lay out the problems and risks when we use tech to track locations of rare or endangered species, and how these risks increase as projects scale. 
  • eBird Is Now Censoring Sightings for 325 At-Risk Species shares an example of a technology that has responded thoughtfully to these problems, protecting at-risk species by managing their data differently. 
  • A decision tree for assessing the risks and benefits of publishing biodiversity data offers an excellent summary of the risks captured in the above cases, and a framework for accounting for risks and benefits when making decisions around sharing data.
• Why do well-designed technologies fail to scale? Addressing the Problem of Scale in Conservation explores why projects that are technically sound will often still fail to gain traction. 

At the end of the lesson, we’ll do an exercise that will help you envision what your chosen challenge might look like in 10 years.  This article can help you imagine what the future might hold: From drone swarms to tree batteries, new tech is revolutionising ecology and conservation.

You can also download the lesson plan as a PDF or a Microsoft Word document below.