Technology for Environmental Impact
Course Content
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Lesson 1: The Role of Tech: Opportunities and Pitfalls
Technology enhances our ability to understand and instigate change within systems. In this lesson, we explore the different levels of insight and influence that technology can help us have within a natural system. helping us address the environmental crisis, and what could (and can’t) it help us do?
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Lesson 2: Ethical and Impactful Tech
In this lesson, we’ll dig deep into the design of your tech and some key considerations as you think about how it will be deployed. Beyond just considering the physical environment that a technology is deployed in, we need to design for the political, cultural, and social environment that a technology will work within.
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Lesson 3: The Lifetime of a Technology
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?
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The Role of Tech: Introduction
How is technology currently helping us address the environmental crisis, and what could (and can’t) it help us do?
Technology enhances our ability to understand and instigate change within systems. In this lesson, we explore the different levels of insight and influence that technology can help us have within a natural system. On one end, a simple camera mounted to a tree to monitor animals can bring profound insights, while an army of satellites takes a photo of the entire earth every day, allowing scientists to understand land use changes faster than ever before. At the other end of the spectrum, technology is increasingly being used to directly influence and protect natural systems in a number of ways, from anti-poaching control to carbon capture technology.
We’ll review some of the technology and methods that are widely used by conservationists, as well as emerging trends and technologies driving new innovation. We’ll cover some of the nuanced risks and pitfalls encountered when using tech for environmental good. Despite these risks, we now live in a world where increasingly powerful technology is being used to exploit nature — and so we must recognize that there may be more risk if we do not apply technology creatively to the problems we see in the natural world.
By completing this lesson, you will:
- Gain an overview of key tools that conservationists use for data collection and for influencing problems.
- Examine cutting-edge initiatives and trends that are pushing the boundaries for technology in conservation.
- Identify opportunities and pitfalls associated with using tech for environmental impact, and learn how to spot a few common mistakes in technology interventions.
- Creatively apply technology to a chosen environmental problem, and draft a first map of how that technology might work.
Pre-Reading
- Conservation technology: The next generation calls on the conservation community to become “technology leaders”, and discusses some of the meta-trends in conservation tech.
- World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature’s Can technology save the planet covers some of the exciting advances in technologies to protect nature. (Read pages 5-6 and skim any sections relevant to your chosen challenge).
- Conservation Technology to Protect Wildlife & Ecosystems – an interactive site with a map of environmental signals that different technologies can measure, and links to further reading.
- The inspiring Frontiers of Impact Tech Report offers an overview of how technology is being used to drive social and environmental impact across all sectors (read pages 6-16, and skim the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) relevant to your chosen challenge on pages 121-158).
- Using Technology to Protect The Seas: in this approachable TED talk, Shah Selbe, founder of Conservify, shares some examples of emerging tech that is being used in ocean conservation.
- Five Ways to Fight Wildlife Crime in the Digital Age is a short, readable article sharing some examples of technology being used in innovative ways. As you compare the examples that are shared, consider: how high-tech or low tech did each of these solutions need to be? Who is building the technology, and who is using it? Which part of the problematic system does the solution target?
- Some critical perspectives on technology for conservation, covering pitfalls and specific ways that technologies have fallen short:
- Digital technology and the conservation of nature frames conservation technology as a “dual-faced force in need of guidance” that can have either beneficial or harmful impacts.
- Technology for nature conservation: An industry perspective calls for a collaboration between tech companies and conservationists.
- Geographies of conservation II: Technology, surveillance and conservation by algorithm: in the future, if we have the tools to capture a complete picture of an ecosystem almost instantaneously, we could theoretically just automate conservation decisions. What are the implications of this?
- In Occam’s Razor for the Planet, the founder of Project Drawdown pushes us to ask hard questions of tech solutions to ensure they’re not “fanciful distractions”: do we really need high-tech approaches? Will they help us in time to address the environmental crisis?
Note: You can also download this lesson’s accompanying slideshow below.