UNEP’s World Environment Day, or ‘WED’, is held on June 5th each year. WED gives us the opportunity to consider the many global and local environmental challenges we face, and provides the impetus for a call to action around the world. The need for large scale ecosystem regeneration and the response to the changing climate, the mitigation required for hazardous chemicals in the environment, management of waste and the impact or our actions on biodiversity number among some of the many challenges faced – and these challenges are complex.
Policy planners, politicians and decision makers need to address these challenges based on the best knowledge and information available, enabled through having the ability to capture, represent and address this complexity. This will be a particularly resonant theme at the upcoming COP26 discussions later this year in Glasgow, UK.
Our contention within NERC’s ‘Constructing a Digital Environment’ (CDE) programme, is that digital tools are now a critical component in supporting and enabling this process – uniquely affording these stakeholders the ability to see the bigger picture and to explore the decision space available – as well as to plan for the future in the light of uncertainty. The role of data-driven science, and the application of AI and techniques such as machine learning will help both unpack this complexity and find optimal routes forward.
The many scientific research projects supported through CDE provide great demonstrators of this potential, realised though working case studies of the benefits of digital environmental science. Together with our newly reinvigorated ‘Expert Network‘ of leading proponents of these approaches, the CDE programme is positioned to provide a leading role in showing the way forward in this relatively new applied scientific theme.