Data+: Reframing the Role of Data in Addressing Environmental Challenges

Saturday, February 20, 2021 - 9:45am to 11:00am

Zoom URL TBD

Panel

Panel 3 Presentations 

Data+: Reframing the Role of Data in Addressing Environmental Challenges  (1 hr 15 min)

Break (15 min)

Panel Discussion + Q&A (45 min)

Data - especially the ubiquitous Big Data - has become critical to measuring the environmental, public health, and justice implications of environmental crises. We seek to understand the role of data and how it is mobilized for the monitoring, enforcement, management, and advocacy of environmental challenges (e.g. illegal logging, exploitative resource extraction in tropical forests etc.). Specifically, we are interested in exploring the following questions:
 
  • How do shifts in spatial scale of data influence the effectiveness of data to support and enact change? In what ways can data help us understand issues at different spatial scales? (“Are there certain instances where data has worked against your objectives?”)
     
  • How are scientists, policymakers, advocates, and community organizers using data to achieve their goals? 
     
  • How can disciplines and their communication platforms help frame/reframe data to maximize its use and relevance? 
     
  • How can data engender relatability and help audiences/stakeholders engage with the opportunities and challenges of an environmental issue? 
 
Panelist
Crystal Davis

Director, Global Forest Watch

Crystal is the Director of Global Forest Watch, a powerful near-real-time forest monitoring system that unites technology and human networks to create never-before-possible transparency on what is happening in forests around the world. She works with companies, governments, and civil society organizations to use better information about forests to mobilize more effective, rights-based conservation and sustainable management. Crystal previously worked on strengthening forest governance Brazil, Indonesia, and Cameroon with WRI’s Institutions and Governance Program. Prior to joining WRI, she worked in environmental consulting in Half Moon Bay, California.  Crystal holds a B.S. and M.S. in Earth Systems Science from Stanford University. Her research encompassed environmental governance in Uganda and conservation biology in the tropical rainforests of South America and Eastern Africa.
 
Panelist
Efren Nango

Dirigente de Educación, CONFENIAE, Member of the Shiwiar

An environmental engineer by training, Efren Nango has taught bilingual courses and seminars on agro-ecology, the socio-economic environmental development of Amazonian nationalities, purposeful leadership, and theology. He has worked as a director for social projects of the Christian church, as an environmental management technician is psychosocial projects, was an administrator of the Jatun Sacha Biological Station in Ecuador, and is currently the education leader of CONFENIAE, an organization that represents the twenty-three indigenous organizations of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Moderator
Ana María Durán Calisto

Lecturer, Yale School of Archtecture; Doctoral candidate at UCLA

Ana María is doctoral candidate at UCLA. Under the advice of Susanna Hecht, she is writing a dissertation on the history of urbanization in the Amazon basin, with a focus on the oil urbanisms of Ecuador. In the year 2010, she received a Loeb Fellowship in advanced environmental studies from the GSD for her proposal to develop an open research network devoted to study the infrastructural integration of South America and provide alternative models of intervention, in lieu of the primarily entropic urbanization that follows the deployment of extraction infrastructures, particularly highways. The network became the South America Project and was spawned in close collaboration with Felipe Correa. Ana María has taught design studios and research seminars at PUCE, Harvard, Columbia, University of Michigan, UC Temuco; and has been teaching fellow at the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She curated the XV Quito Architecture Biennial: Visible Cities, was National Curator for the IX BIAU, and academic advisor for the UN Conference Habitat III. She is currently a member of the Scientific Panel for the Amazon (SPA) convened by the SDSN and the UN.

Panelist
Peter Umunay
Africa Regional Coordinator for Forest and Climate Change (UN-REDD) at UNEP
 
 

Dr. Peter Umunay is the Africa Regional Coordinator for Forest and Climate Change (UN-REDD) at UN Environmental Programme and PhD scholar at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Peter has 10+ years of work experience with international organizations, academic institutions and governments.  His work is mostly interdisciplinary interested in the impacts of human induced deforestation and forest degradation on forest carbon and biodiversity conservation, conservation and forest valuation, community-based natural forest management, improving forest governance, REDD+ and forest carbon accounting, zero-deforestation in commodity supply chain and land use finance.