I am talking about the effects of drastic climate change that is occurring right now whereby we are witnessing catastrophic environmental damage on earth – raging fires in the Amazon, Hurricane Dorian, unprecedented speed of Antarctica melting, dramatic thinning of Greenland’s ice sheet, the list goes on and on.
And all of this is due to climate change that is showing its effects more pointedly than ever; and accumulation of the accelerated modernization of the world over the past 3 decades.
Environmental scientists say that we only have a ’10-Year Window’ to fundamentally change the way we deal with the 3 largest areas that contribute to climate change – Energy Usage, Power Generation and Transportation.
This ’10-Year Window’ is all we get before we would have passed the tipping point to be able to try reverse environmental decay, making Armageddon a self-inflicted prophecy.
The only good news is that humanity happens to be now at a pivotal moment with a convergence of frontier technologies – Big Data and AI, IoT and mobile devices, blockchain and open source, drones and satellites, etc…all of these can be deployed towards an attempt to salvage from an environmental crisis of no return.
Of course there is so much to be done before technologies can work together to collectively slow down the world’s greenhouse gas and carbon emissions.
Even where there is institutional leadership shown on the private sector front, we can clearly see that global environmental governance frameworks are still slow to be negotiated and even slower for its policies to be enforced. It doesn’t help that the world’s most advanced country has a leader that thinks that climate change is just fake news at most…
Formed in December 2017, the UN Environment Assembly tries to galvanise over 2000 expert communities around the world to ‘grow green technology markets that are driven by advances in science and technology, empowering policies and innovative financing.
In order for the UN to effectively provide its member governments with environmental assessments and proposed action, it first needs insights on regional climate data – loads of it, to form the guidance of policy measures for environmental quality, resource efficiencies and sustainable systems.
To capitalise this ’10-Year Window’, green technologists are talking about having a
‘digital ecosystem’ whereby frontier technologies can be effectively put together to achieve sustainable development.
And the fundamental basis of how this ‘digital ecosystem’ works is on a culture of open (environmental) data for integration, reference and governance..
Governments need to share their climate data, in order to be able to leverage the expertise of the private sector in the respective frontier technologies mentioned earlier; and the UN is the best to take leadership in driving this ‘digital ecosystem’ in both promoter and watchdog roles.
IT Bytes Back Says: Indeed, data is the ‘New Gold’ in today’s economy. But an economy, no matter how new and digitally advanced, is naught if the world is decimated from environmental disasters due to climate change. So if technology is the only hope for mankind, let’s all consciously make it succeed within the next decade.
