Harnessing emerging technologies for communities and conservation

7th June 2024, Friday | 14.00 – 15.30 CEST

 

Digital technologies are one of conservation’s leading edges. Large-scale conservation institutions and programmes rely increasingly on digital technologies to store and manage data, monitor wildlife, identify, design, zone and demarcate conservation areas, and predict conservation futures. Increasingly, communities and community-based organisations are keen to engage in and mobilise these technologies to implement their own management, demarcation and monitoring processes. Yet digital data management remains a contested field, rife with the possibility (and reality) of oppression, exclusion and extraction.

In this session we will explore how community-based conservation initiatives can engage with digital technologies to enhance community rights and manage biodiversity and territories, learning more about the potential of specific technologies such as GIS and AI. We will explore the challenges and threats of using digital approaches for protecting local and ancestral knowledge, and how these can be mitigated. We will also learn about emergent initiatives for environmental data justice that seek to protect communities from the ‘downsides of data’ and data extractivism.

 

Bios:

Aliya Ryan

Aliya leads the local partnerships team at Awana Digital (previously Digital Democracy). This work involves deep relationship building, training and accompaniment with Indigenous communities across the world who are using technology, in particularly in the Amazon and East Africa.

Aliya has worked with Indigenous peoples on issues of land rights, data sovereignty and biocultural mapping for over twenty years. She co-founded and directed the Peruvian non-profit Shinai, and with Awana Digital, Aliya led the territory mapping work with the Waorani and Siekopai nations, alongside Alianza Ceibo and Amazon Frontlines in Ecuador. 

More recently Aliya has been working with the Ogiek of Mount Elgon; is involved in building a strong co-design program within Awana Digital to ensure frontline users are centred in our technology design process; and is supporting groups to move from data collection to advocacy and impact, building strategies to use their data for storytelling, legal enforcement and internal governance.  

Phoebe Ndiema

Phoebe Ndiema was born and raised in Mt. Elgon, in the western part of Kenya. She comes from the Ogiek Indigenous community.

Currently, she is working with a community organization called the Chepkitale Indigenous People Development Project to pursue tenure rights, environmental rights, and the human rights of the Ogiek people. She is taking the lead on Gender Justice Projects, which include but are not limited to leadership and governance, economic empowerment, and capacity building. Other projects she is working on include mapping Ogiek territory resources/Boititap Korenyo and documenting the history of the 32 clans defining the Ogiek community.

She was a Biodiversity Fellow at Oxford University under the Department of Biology, developing a community-led biodiversity monitoring system.

Rudo Kemper

Rudo is a geographer and technologist with over a decade of experience supporting Indigenous and other communities in mapping and monitoring their lands, and building digital tools that increase self-determination and autonomy. His professional experience includes fieldwork with communities throughout the Amazon, Caribbean, North America, East Africa, and Oceania, and steering the direction of several digital mapping tools and platforms, including Terrastories, Earth Defenders Toolkit, and Native Land Digital.

Zoom video recording is now available on our YouTube channel.

Link to recording on YouTube

Conservation’s Leading Edges

This session is part of the In Conversation Series: Conservation’s Leading Edges.