Sustainable Futures Seminar Series: final event
17 Jun 2022
Join us on Thursday, 7 July
Dr Johan Oldekop, Senior Lecturer in Environment & Development, Global Development Institute: Complex policies for complex landscapes: Understanding relative social and environmental outcomes of conservation interventions
Designing and implementing policy interventions that jointly address social and environmental challenges remains an urgent and intractable problem. Our understanding of the relative effects and interactions of different interventions that co-occur in space and time, and how their multiple impacts are influenced by broader socio-economic changes remains limited due four key research limitations. I show how the combination of large-scale social and environmental datasets and techniques that emulate randomised control trials can generate a more nuanced understanding of the relative effects and interactions of multiple conservation and development interventions on social and environmental outcomes.
Dr Rose Pritchard, Presidential Academic Fellow in Social-Environmental Systems, Global Development Institute: Just transitions in a data-fied world: data justice in biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration
Advances in digital technologies have transformed the kinds of data available about rural landscapes and the ways that data can be used in conservation research and practice. While this creates exciting opportunities, often forgotten is that data are never entirely neutral. The kinds of data collected, and the uses to which these data are put, reflect the different sets of values and relationships of power shaping conservation landscapes. This means that data could be used to advance equitable, impactful conservation efforts, or alternatively could serve to reinforce unjust conservation practices harmful to particular peoples, species, or ecosystems.