Collaborative climate futures? Envisioning the role of open data infrastructures for collaborative socio-environmental research

Abstract

Environmental research has been at the forefront of the debate concerning the present and the future of planetary health. As the question of climate change and crisis looms large and the struggles around environmental injustice become more visible, both private and public climate research funders and institutions are emphasizing the urgent need for knowledge cross-pollination and co-production. This is happening not only across technoscientific projects but across communities that are often included as "support personnel," but not bona fide research partners with voice and decision-making power. Geophysical characterizations of climate change are not enough to understand and respond to the challenges that vulnerable communities face worldwide. It is in this context that we seek to articulate a future in which technologists, researchers, and community members have the basic conditions to create common data infrastructures to enable collaborative environmental research. In this article, we discuss the main motivation for creating a stack for socio-environmental research based on the need for infrastructures that can be understood and governed by the communities on whose land climate research is conducted. In the conclusion, we revisit open questions of community stewardship as they relate to pressing challenges of data sovereignty based on open technologies for climate research.