Data science for global environmental risk assessment

Background

The United Nations’ 2030 "Agenda for Sustainable Development" calls for a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. It aims to take the bold and transformative steps that are urgently needed to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path. Developing a clear understanding of the challenges faced, and identification of potential solutions to enable delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals, requires high quality, accessible, timely and reliable disaggregated data. Increasingly, understanding the impacts of sustained changes in the context of the natural variability that is present in environmental processes will be based on analyses of data from outside of the sphere of its intended use. The differences between using routinely available data and data that has been collected as part of a carefully designed experiment requires a fundamental change in approach, acknowledging all aspects of data, including interactions between collection (including potential biases), governance, analysis, interpretation, communication and the future use of resulting composite datasets in other fields. The aim of the workshop is to explore how data science and AI can be used to help address today’s most important environmentally related societal challenges, including climate variability, extreme weather events, air quality, global health, water and energy distribution, and the spread of infectious disease. The focus will be on the combination of data driven and model-based approaches, the computational challenges of implementing complex models in the presence of massive data, and the challenges of evidence-based decision making when using data from a multiple, non-traditional, sources.

This one-day workshop was in Exeter on Thursday 17th May 2018, organised by Gavin Shaddick (Exeter) and ReCoVER.

Schedule: Harry's Meeting Rooms, Longbrooke Street, Exeter, EX4 6AP

09:30 Arrival tea and coffee, Welcome

09:45 Lightning talks

11:30 Keynote talk: Jim Zidek, University of British Columbia

Modelling environmental spatio-temporal process and compensating for bias in the selection of sites to monitor them

12:30 Breakout sessions, including Lunch at 13:00

14:00 Reporting back

14:30 Tea break

15:00 Keynote led discussion: Paul Lussier, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

Communicating and network building towards a regenerative world

16:00 Closing session, Gavin Shaddick

Closing thoughts, and funding opportunities

16:30 Workshop Close

18:30 Meal in Exeter at Bill's