
Environmental monitoring
In environmental sustainability challenges, technology is widely seen as important, with a particular focus on technologies for environmental monitoring. However, environmental monitoring technologies have also been criticised for displacing community knowledge and reinforcing hierarchies of knowledge and expertise.
ETL’s research speaks directly to this challenge through our concern with addressing inequities that are reproduced in technology design, and considering how technologies can become part of the solution by transforming underlying social relations.
Currently, we have two environmental monitoring projects that are exploring this approach. In India we’re working with other UK universities, partner communities and government stakeholders in the flood and landslide areas of the northern state of Uttarakhand, co-developing landslide models that respond to the priorities of marginalised communities in the Joshimath - Rudraprayag - Rishikesh catchment. By integrating modelling technology with community knowledge, this project provides local people with a voice in disaster risk governance arrangements that hitherto have overlooked their knowledge, expertise, priorities and attitudes.
We’re also exploring a similar approach in work with fishing communities along the north east coast of England. Here, economic, environmental and policy changes have buffeted fishers’ livelihoods for decades, straining relationships with key government departments. These tensions have resurfaced following the mass crustation die-off that emerged during October 2021, in which a large number of dead and dying crustaceans washed-up in multiple locations along the coast line, and continued into 2022 and 2023. The DEFRA-led response has been challenged by the North East Fishing Collective, a co-operative of commercial fishing associations, angling societies and stakeholders from along the north-east coast. ETL is now working with the fishers, including members of the collective, to explore how they can become central to a new water monitoring approach that provides a place for their expertise in data production processes, enabling the voice and priorities of local fishing communities to be represented in future policy decisions. The aim is to develop a robust approach to water quality monitoring - which up to now has been absent, despite the international significance of the fishery - but to do so in a way that foregrounds and legitimises the knowledge and livelihoods of local fishing communities.
In other projects, ETL environmental research is focused on transforming how engineering challenges are framed and defined, reconfiguring technology development as a socio-technical problem space. For example, waste management in small island settings is a longstanding problem rooted in the complexity of island social, cultural and governance relations that are required to enable infrastructure development. One example of this is on the Isles of Scilly. This is an internationally important habitat for seabirds, but predation of eggs by invasive brown rats is threatening endangered seabird populations. Domestic food waste from the five inhabited islands is an important food source for this rat population. Approaches to manage food waste are thus pivotal to ongoing work of the Isles of Scilly Seabird Recovery Project partnership to eradicate rats and restore seabird populations.
The impact of not carrying out local recycling has additional consequences. All residual waste is currently transported from the islands to the mainland for incineration, incurring significant carbon emissions and financial costs. Food waste represents lost nutrients that could support local food production (there is high demand for fertiliser, but financial and carbon costs of importation are high). Finally, food waste presents a risk to public health and wellbeing as collection requires residents to aggregate mixed waste and store in large, difficult to access and frequently damaged sacks on the island quay.
ETL’s work in Scilly is therefore framed by an urgent need to manage waste as a necessary component of protecting and restoring historic biodiversity, while also generating benefits for human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. This is a practical challenge, requiring technical, social and governance changes among multiple island communities with different histories, geographies and cultural norms and values, and each with informal arrangements that manage conflict and cooperation. This is inherently a socio-technical problem, and in the ETL we’re exploring composting waste management solutions - the technical and institutional arrangements that will allow for the adaptation of established digester hardware and novel sensor technology to support waste processing and locally appropriate compost production.
A similar approach has been adopted in work with farming communities, which has explored how the longstanding exclusion of farmers from the process of technology development can be reimagined through farmer-led innovation approaches.