Sharing Is Everything

Jacqueline McGlade is executive director of the European Environment Agency. She has published more than two hundred scientific papers, articles and books on marine science, ecosystem dynamics and the governance of natural resources.

I work for an interesting organisation. It is a European Union body, the European Environment Agency, based in Copenhagen. It perhaps had one of the most insightful foundations, based on a regulation which is still fit for purpose nearly twenty years later because right back then it created a network. It created Eionet, the European Environment Information and Observation Network, made up of people and very rudimentary technology at that time. And it’s been the people in the countries, the networks, the experts working together that have really brought Europe into a situation where we at least feel that we understand what the problems are.

Communication and Consensus

The European Environment Agency is much bigger now. It has a two-hundred staff membership, and our work extends right to the edges of Russia, down to North Africa and all around. When we do our daily business we do it in twenty-six languages and we work with countries with a collective population of eight hundred and seventy million people. But fundamentally it’s still about people talking to one another, and that regular updating, delivering the best information that we can, I think is what keeps us honest. It’s a partnership that is built sometimes on fractious discussions, on disagreements, but in the end is always about consensus, and consensus comes from trust because at the end of the day we share not only our data, our information, but our understanding and ultimately a vision of what the world is all around us.

And what is that? It’s a world of growing pressures. You’ve heard so many presentations that tell us what the impacts of those pressures are. I don’t need to repeat any of the messages. But we are actually undertaking industrialisation on a massive scale, below the surface of the seas, up into the skies, everywhere. And we feel it. Our job in a way is to sit very much as if in a beautiful old car with lots of dials, gathering lots of information. We’re very interested in many, many things. The problem is that my constituency are the turbo-jet guys. These are the guys that write the policies. They just want four dials. Are we going in the right direction? Are we going fast enough?

We have to translate all this lovely, lovely information into something that will give people the right signal. Unfortunately, the things that are on the dials today in our cars are actually not very good. The prices are not quite right. We don’t seem to be measuring things enough, quickly enough. So there are many things that we need to improve.

The Need for Change

Why do we need to improve them? Well I think that any of you who read the Economist would perhaps have stopped for a minute and reread the following phrase: “Reality is changing faster than theory suggests.” I think when the Economist says something like that, a certain amount of nervousness is the reasonable response. I think it is quite interesting for the Economist even to allow us to take breath. Why does it say that? Because even they have recognised—those wonderful economists and those other writers—that we have entered a new geological period, the Anthropocene, in which the hallmark, the fingerprint, of humans is absolutely to be found everywhere on the planet.

So what do we do? Of course, we all want change, but we have to have change that we believe in. We have to have change that we think is meaningful. And so while it’s fantastic to gather stories, I see the other side of it which is that we need firm governance. We need strong institutions. We need people who are accountable, but accountable through the right sense of delivering information to the right centres and the right decision-making processes.

A very interesting discussion for the Rio+20 conference is, Why is it that the phrase “green economy” potentially could divide us instead of bringing us together? If we think about a loose definition of “green economy”—policies and innovations that would enable society to increase wellbeing while preserving the natural systems that sustain us—who wouldn’t want that? The difficulty is that the way it gets translated has begun to divide us into a North and South community. And I think that if there’s ever a challenge that Eye on Earth and this summit have to address, it is the North–South divide, and why can’t we have a green economy, a sustainable way of living, delivered through good information, evidence and policy-making? Now that’s really the question. And how can we do that? I think this summit will really meet the biggest challenge of its life going into Rio because we will all be held accountable as to what is the information we can provide that will help decision-makers perhaps make good decisions when we leave Brazil in the later part of the year.

Now I want to come back to the day job, because even if you’re going to build and design a green economy based on words, there have to be things on the ground. There have to be actions and people have to see what has to happen.

Hazardous Waste

We have so much hazardous waste in this world. We have it moving around, sometimes illegally, sometimes legally, but still we are creating chemicals that are damaging to humans, that are damaging to ecosystems and that persist and bio-accumulate. The European Environment Agency released a report in November 2011 about all the industries in Europe that report, several thousand of them, all open, all openly reported, all compliant and so all obeying the law, and yet still the cost of pollutions from those installations is up to 169 billion euros a year to human health and ecosystems. Fifty per cent of that pollution comes from 191 installations only. So even when we put in regulations, we still have an underbelly that we need to address.

We have to ask who is going to pay for the pollution, the clean-up. We at the European Environment Agency have just finished filming in India what I would call the informal economy—people sitting in backyards, in ghettos and slums, breaking apart pieces of electrical equipment, smashing up pieces of plastic, extracting out tiny pieces of metal, washing it in rivers. Frankly, no one else will do it. It’s worth quite a lot of money. The government itself admits that this is the inefficient bit that companies really can’t deal with. We need an informal economy, but we have to protect the people who are doing that. We cannot afford to have that waste processed in a way that is hazardous to human health. And let’s be very clear: these are wastes coming from Europe and North America.

In the circles that I am part of, we talk a lot about “decoupling”. This is a very interesting concept. It asks whether you can grow human wellbeing and the economy without continuing to damage the environment. Can you decouple these two phenomena—economic growth and environmental damage? And so we’ve developed lots of indicators, lots of measures. And it’s by that, that we will live or die, I think. And buying into those indicators means that every part of society has to understand where the materials come from that they are using and what they are going to do with them when they’ve finished.

We’ve all heard, I hope, about the outcome from the Durban Climate Change Conference, which concluded on 11 December. I was there and there was a very interesting discussion this time, more muted, more quiet, and I think very successful in many ways, because there was at least an engagement and a recognition that we have to manage emissions, whether it’s in developing countries or not. A lot of the rhetoric of, “You did that to us therefore we’re going to wait until you fix it”, has begun to disappear.

We heard the analogy this morning of the boat with a hole in it and everybody having a hole in their boat. Actually, you have to fix your own boat first.

Recognising Mistakes

We make mistakes. Europe makes lots of mistakes, but we’re realising that as soon as we understand them we have to fix them. We can’t just let them go on. I know that Europe has been criticised for its biofuels policy, and I think that you can see that the sustainability criteria are testing us, but still the information comes back that we have to do something. So, recognising mistakes is very important.

Extracting resources, virgin resources, is a huge temptation from a country’s point of view of wanting to get the money today—resource rents, really understanding and realising the capital. But I can tell you most businesses would like to pay royalties and pay them a long time in the future, not today. So how do we arbitrate between those two positions? There’s a very interesting point here about disclosure. The disclosure projects around the world which industries are coming into are very, very important.

If I think generally about the way that we live, we should not forget that design and innovation are incredibly important. And we need to encourage that because as things currently stand we cannot continue to consume the amount of raw resources we have been consuming. So we need innovation. We need to find ways of replacing some of the rare earths in unusual combinations because countries stockpile. This creates weird price signals. They actually create scarcity where there is no scarcity. We also need to incentivise people to introduce the right kinds of innovations, the right kinds of things, as opposed to disincentives which take us sometimes in the wrong direction. We need new ways of living, whether we live on the oceans or wherever we are. We must think again about how we actually live on this planet. We need to feed ourselves locally. And I come back again to the fact that there’s no such thing any more as local sustainability without global sustainability. We just cannot do it on our own.

So, waste is a common problem across most of the world, but in food it’s a particular, dramatic feature. A vast amount of food is actually wasted, either on the farm or by the time we haven’t consumed it, and it ends up in the landfill—that’s in a European context. We have so much to do as regards our thinking that it’s OK to throw away food.

But it isn’t easy. When I started in the European Environment Agency, I would honestly say I was in a silo world, but that has had to change. Everything is interrelated, in very complex ways. You cannot talk about transport without dealing with biodiversity because of protected areas. You can’t talk about forests without dealing with agriculture. And so it goes on.

Accounting, the idea of accounting for the assets that we have, while on the one hand it sounds very banal, is the way that governments work very well. They have national accounts, and we can link environmental accounts and ecosystem accounts to that. In fact, Europe will begin to do that in 2012. For the first time, heads of state will be held accountable, not just for GDP and employment, but also for greenhouse gas emissions, domestic material consumption, their carbon accounts. So, it’s going to be very interesting to see how heads of state deal with those numbers because they’ve never had to make decisions on this basis before.

Sharing Data

Underpinning this—and it’s something of which I’m very proud in Europe because we’ve finally arrived at the point where we are up there with America—we actually now have an open-data policy, a European policy, but it’s underpinning many things. One of these is the shared environmental information system, based on the principle of establishing reliable data and publishing and sharing it with others. Take responsibility for your data. Make sure it’s quality-assured so that others can actually rely on it. And there are many other principles. It ensures that science, as we call it, is in the backbone of much of what we do.

But it’s not enough. We need to encourage governments to do more—fiscal reform, tax reform, so many things, getting rid of harmful subsidies. We need to enable governments and organisations and people to do more things. We need to engage with people and we need to give great examples. We need drama in our lives. We need inspiration. We need people who can tell us what to do and how to go about things. And in the information technology world there’s been drama. We’ve had the Google world, the Bing world, Apple Mac. All those things have come onto the table. It’s been fascinating to watch it from afar. But what has been fascinating from our side, that of the user, is how we can cajole big industry really to help us do our job, the user actually coming to the front.

About four or five years ago in the European Environment Agency we decided that we wanted to bring citizens into the picture. There are four hundred and ninety million of them in Europe, and we wanted to talk to them, so we ran an experiment. We gave them access to the official data, the air-quality data, the water-quality data in Europe. We brought down information from satellites, from models. And then we put citizens in communication with this data. We tried an SMS service so that if you had a breathing disorder you could get an early alert to see whether you should go out that day. We brought it right down to street level. We used social media. And after some time—good and bad experiences, crowd sourcing (could we use it or not?), a lot of cajoling, a lot of persuading with our colleagues in the European Commission, the policymakers, the legislature—we really felt that we could do this properly. We could operationalise it, certainly from within the European setting. We worked hard.

Then another whole community arrived. This is the in situ, the people who are measuring things on the planet. They’re everywhere. They have smart sensors. They’re up in airplanes. They’ve got all kinds of gizmos. And they actually want to connect.

We have a programme called GMES, the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security, and it really tries to build in the satellite capacity, and then our job in the agency is to connect it to those who are on the ground. Here’s an example of an integrated monitoring system connecting space and earth and it’s all got to work in real time.

There are cheap sensors. We can actually go out into the world with very cheap sensors now. Six euros can measure air quality. So it’s possible for us to equip citizens to be, I wouldn’t say passive sensors, but to walk around the world and help us monitor things, on phones, and similar devices. And of course we have true institutional relationships. We have to make these work. People in these various institutions have all been brought up on very different technologies, different ways of working together, services with big models, other people with paper maps, and so on. They all have different governments and have different ways of working. And that’s actually what sharing challenges us with because we have to have conversations with people who in the past have sat in their silos being very comfortable. We actually need to communicate properly with them.

Uniting for Sustainability

Now, to do that we fall into all kinds of worlds, the open source community, the community that’s linked to data, and so on. And everyone is going at different speeds, but somehow we need to provide a vision. We need to spearhead a way where there’s a real need, well-defined, and where we think we can succeed.

We won’t solve all the problems immediately, but we can solve a lot of them today. This is why I think that this Eye on Earth summit is important, as do our partners—all the providers of information that have come together here, Microsoft and the Environmental Systems Research Institute, the United Nations Environment Programme, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the Abu Dhabi government, Kuwait. We all agree on how significant these initiatives will be, actually to share data to publish together.

It is a global public service. It’s a free thing for you to be able to use. It has many parts to it. I won’t go into the details of it, but it’s to tell you that the time has come when even big industry will step up to the plate and face its responsibilities about connecting things better. We have to make it possible for people to exchange information from all those different communities—to make intelligent map services, to put things on telephones, and in the end to create information that policymakers can really use and understand.

Eye on Earth steps in to help do that. We’re not saying that anyone gives up their sovereignty. We’re saying you keep responsibility for your data, for your information, but you share it. You publish it via the cloud. You allow others to look over the fence and see what’s there to make new connections and to make new stories that previously were very, very difficult to make.

Why do we think we can do that? Because we take responsibility, in some cases as institutions, to make sure that we have a secure bedrock, a base map, a reference layer which is quality-assured through all the normal procedures of institutions and governments. By making that available, people can build a sustainable world. They can put their operational layers in. They can build an idea of their neighbourhood, what it’s like to live where they do. It can be as simple as drag and drop, so you don’t have to have complicated software systems. Anybody in principle who knows how to use a mouse and a keyboard can use the Eye on Earth systems.

For example, one can overlay a dynamic shipping picture on protected marine areas. When we put in the wave-height data we can see that there are some places that are going to be in danger in the future, something which our own governments would not necessarily have done in their own way. And this information can be made available across the Internet. So today you can monitor noise wherever you are, send it and it will arrive on the Eye on Earth platform, on its servers. At Rio, we will also be bringing forward Nature Watch so that people can understand the biodiversity that’s around them, where the species are that are edible, where the invasive species come from.

Tweeting is very important. Why? Because of what you can do when you put it together with something as basic as an infrastructure. Russia, for example, published its infrastructure this summer, into the public domain, every building in the Russian Federation, its ownership and valuation for tax purposes. That kind of transparency, that openness, together with very important information as to who owns what—even if you lived in a slum you would benefit from actually having the basics of a cadastre. To be able to photo-ID your site, put it onto a cadastre, means that you now can have genuine accessibility to education and many other things. It also means that at times of disasters, as in Haiti, perhaps you can find where people were who had been lost.

All of these things are very important. Governments have to play a role, and part of the job of my agency and others around the world is to hold governments to account so that citizens, whether they’re in the far, far north or in the deep jungles in Borneo, can connect. One of our friends is Tabaran from the Penan tribe, a tribe that walks through the forests in Borneo; he talks to us.

We would love you to join us. Eye on Earth is a network. I believe that when we leave the Abu Dhabi summit it will tell the world that something really important happened here and that we can actually connect across all those silos. We can talk to policymakers. We can connect citizens with their governments. At the same time, we can give governments the sense that they’re actually moving in the right direction.