Digital Technology for Disaster Risk Reduction: 'Making Tech Work for All of Us'
Radio and Cell Tower
By Shefali Juneja Lakhina, PhD - Dr. Lakhina is co-founder of Wonder Labs––a social enterprise that catalyzes social and ecological innovations with communities on the frontline of climate impacts.
In recent years, digital technology has enhanced the speed and scale at which risk assessment, early warning, disaster response, and recovery can be conducted. Yet, challenges remain in the development, application, and deployment of digital technology, including issues with data quality, interoperability, and equitable access. The United Nations-led private sector alliance for disaster resilient societies, the ARISE-US network, recently hosted a virtual symposium on Digital Technology for Disaster Risk Reduction to discuss some of these opportunities and remaining challenges. The symposium invited two back-to-back panels to unpack how digital technology can be life-saving while also acknowledging the need to overcome tech solutionism.
The panels reflected on how digital technology can be developed in open, democratic, and equitable ways to enable collective safety and well-being. I had the pleasure of moderating one of the two panels. In this blog (reposted from Medium), I share the high-level framing for our panel discussion and suggest useful resources for further reading. You can also watch the two-hour recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bRx9gNQUa4&t=3759s
It is important to acknowledge that this discussion around the benefits and challenges of digital technology is not new. We’ve always been concerned with how technology can work for us and improve our life experience. Back in 1950, Norbert Wiener’s thesis on cybernetics weighed the benefits and challenges of automation. Wiener’s hope was that machines could amplify the human experience by relieving people from repetitive tasks and free us for more creative pursuits. In 2022, enter ChatGPT. Not surprisingly, we continue to have conversations around the uses of A.I., and how technology can enhance the human experience, saving us time, and making our lives more efficient, productive, and perhaps creative. We are in an inevitable ‘race after technology’. But in American sociologist Ruha Benjamin’s usage of that term, a consideration of social biases, including race, gender, and abilities, cannot be an afterthought — after the technology has been developed.
We are recognizing how important it is to be intentional about what technology is created, by whom, for what purpose, leading to what outcomes. Also, as we begin to wield the power to catalogue and query the whole earth, from forests, to watersheds, cities, and animals, we’re learning more about the nature of data itself. Data is not just in the cloud, an abstract or invisible thing. Data is situated and generated in particular kinds of geographies and infrastructures. We also know that data infrastructures can be unevenly produced and inequitably accessed. To address this issue, we are beginning to leverage open and more democratic Web3 technologies, but challenges remain.
As Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna observes in his recent book, we are all, seeking dignity in a digital age. Data infrastructure must expand in equitable ways to bridge the urban-rural divide, the gender divide, the race divide, and the ableist divide, among others. Also, we must reimagine data infrastructure in a way that centers convergent public-private-philanthropy-people partnerships, to be responsive to diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences. The need for fostering convergent partnerships has previously also been highlighted by ARISE-US during an American Society of Adaptation Professionals’ (ASAP) 2022 Co-creation Webinar on Global Adaptation Action: Breaking the Disaster Cycle–Building Equity Through Collaboration Before Crisis. Watch the one-hour webinar here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kBTxclkTds
Ongoing discussions around who develops technology and for what intended purpose, underlines the importance of intentionally moving from output-centered piecemeal collaborations towards outcome-focused convergent partnerships that can deliver digital justice. We want and need technology to work for all of us.