Environmental peacebuilding could benefit from COVID-era data innovation. A well-documented obstacle environmental peacebuilders face is a lack of shared, empirical datasets among parties engaged in, recovering from, or descending into conflict. Current innovations in data collection may soon help seal these gaps. 

Countries throughout the world have expanded their data collection capabilities to track the spread of COVID-19. From text message contact tracing to drone surveillance, these innovations inform national responses and shape the global case counting webpages that many of us anxiously refresh every day. The information networks established during the pandemic may endure far into the future, informing new goals, projects, and policies. 

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

With a burst of global innovation, communities have found many ways to manipulate technologies from drones to phones to fight the coronavirus. If these data collection innovations remain intact after the pandemic, they may play a crucial role in the future of environmental peacebuilding.

Creative solutions to the problems posed by COVID-19 have cropped up in many countries. In Ghana, drones collect COVID-19 tests from remote areas and deliver medical supplies to hospital staff who order them by texting. Young entrepreneurs in Côte d’Ivoire are also using drones to broadcast messages to citizens, thermally scan crowds for fever, and digitally map the spread of the virus. 

Other countries have created centralized digital platforms to make information available to the masses. Nepal’s coronavirus dashboard compiles infection statistics from each municipality. And its Migration Assistant feature monitors the movement of immigrants, mainly from India. Ukraine has created a similar countrywide dashboard. It also compiles data from sectors including educational attainment and environmental health to create a compounded vulnerability index to COVID-19 for each oblast, or province.  

In many instances, open source platforms enable citizens to participate in response planning through ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) like cellphones. Access to digital technology has grown exponentially, resulting in 53 percent of the global population using the Internet as of 2019. In Iraq, citizens can submit photos and videos directly to the centralized coronavirus database to have their concerns heard by decision-makers. This same database updates constantly as healthcare workers submit medical and demographic data through smartphone applications. 

Growing Data Collection Efforts

Gathering robust, shared datasets can build trust between stakeholders and advance advocacy efforts through visualizations of how conflicts play out on the ground. Consequently, data network expansion for environmental peacebuilding has been a growing body of work even before the onset of the pandemic. Organizations like Conservation X Labs, for instance, have created an open, collaborative digital platform that promotes innovative solutions to global biodiversity loss. 

Southern African countries sharing transboundary water sources employ “big data” approaches to improve water security and diminish conflicts. The information provided by data collection can also establish a basis for policymaking and resource allocation. This is the case in Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Basin where the implementation of data analytics has revealed a connection between agricultural waste and a decline in the local fishing industry. 

Where well-developed data collection networks already exist, or where there is enough financial and technological capital, useful data might already exist. In developing regions, this may not be the case. Where data collection networks formed in response to the pandemic remain intact, there is great potential for data-driven environmental peacebuilding. The COVID-19 virus has catalyzed innovation throughout the world, demonstrating that compiling large amounts of data is possible in nearly every corner of the world. 

Emergent Ethical Considerations

While widespread data collection can provide crucial advantages to environmental peacebuilding, it also introduces pressing ethical concerns. In fact, the United Nations and the World Health Organization recently released a joint statement specifically addressing the ethical challenges posed by COVID-19 data collection. 

Countries like South Korea, Singapore and Israel have ramped up citizen surveillance, collecting troves of data from smartphones, CCTV, and even credit card purchases. In China, surveillance efforts are even more intense as drones and facial recognition software keep a fixed eye on the population. As data collection accelerates, so does the incidence of breaches and privacy violations, which increased by 273 percent in 2020. Given the importance of trust-building in environmental peacebuilding, data collection could fuel rather than quell conflicts if data privacy is mismanaged. 

Access to the data that is collected is often available to only certain parties, which leads to information asymmetry. This power imbalance complicates the management of natural resources whose success is crucial to the process of environmental peacebuilding. The UN Environmental Program emphasizes the need for public access to information and transparent institutions in the management of natural resources. The parties that control data networks can also control how, or if, citizens access information. One such example in Africa involves internet shutdowns that have risen in the past decade as central powers partially or totally blocked access to the Internet. 

In order for data collection networks to build trust rather than destroy it, environmental peacebuilders should take careful steps to ensure data security and democratize access to information as much as possible. 

In the midst of the Age of Information, the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated a global push for data innovation. As the tendrils of data collection networks stretch further, decision-makers within the environmental peacebuilding field may benefit from more informed policies, shared datasets, and empiric information.

It is unlikely that our reliance on data will lose momentum once the pandemic is brought under control, so decision-makers should reckon with the changing role of data collection and plan accordingly. Leveraging the networks and technologies used to fight the coronavirus for environmental peacebuilding could fill many information gaps, especially in conflict-prone or developing countries.