Seeing, Knowing and Acting in the Climate-Biodiversity Nexus – exploring digital technologies for transformative change

To address the double crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss, growing expectations are placed on digital technologies, e.g artificial intelligence, virtual reality, or digital twins, to contribute to sustainability transformations.New digital tools seek to expand our capacities to monitor, assess and govern the earth system.

Yet, such tools have been criticized for fostering simplistic sense-making of complex interactions in the climate-biodiversity-society nexus.

Thus, many have called for the integration of local and traditional knowledge in the monitoring and review of international climate and biodiversity negotiations.This project explores 1) the use of new digital tools for analysing data and for visualising progress toward climate and biodiversity goals, 2) how experts and practitioners make sense of such tools and of their roles for sustainability transformations, 3) how new digital technologies can be harnessed to integrate diverse forms of knowledge and foster transformative learning.Combining cutting-edge critical analysis with agile methodological experimentation –including arts-based methods – the project engages with key stakeholders to advance the understanding of the risks and possibilities of digital ways of seeing, knowing, and acting upon climate and biodiversity loss.

Through the research team’s participation in the IPCC and IPBES assessment processes, the project will directly feed into the knowledge platforms that underpin international policy.