Pandemic 2.0: Can Information Technology Help Save The Planet?

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. L. Garrett, “The Return of Infectious Disease,” Foreign Affairs 75, no. 1 (1996): 66–79. Quote from G. R. Pallipparambil, “The Surat Plague and its Aftermath,” unpublished essay, http://entomology.Montana.edu/historybug/YersiniaEssays/Godshen.htm (accessed 1 August 2009). 2. D. L. Heymann and G. Rodier, “Global Surveillance, National Surveillance and SARS,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 10, no. 2 (2004): 173–75; D. L. Heymann, “SARS and Emerging Infectious Diseases: A Challenge to Place Global Solidarity above National Sovereignty,” Annals of the Academy of Medicine 35, no. 5 (2006): 350–53; and E. S. Michelson, “Dodging a Bullet: WHO, SARS, and the Successful Management of Infectious Disease,” Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 25, no. 5 (2005): 379–86. 3. C. Folke, “Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analyses,” Global Environmental Change 16, no. 3 (2007): 253–67; J-P. Voss, D. Bauknecht, R. Kemp, eds., Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006); and R. Kemp, D. Loorbach, and J. Rotmans, “Transition Management as a Model for Managing Processes of Co-evolution towards Sustainable Development Transition Management,” in M. M. Andersen and A. Tukker, eds., Perspectives on Radical Changes to Sustainable Consumption and Production (Roskilde, Denmark, and Delft, The Netherlands: RISØ and TNO, 2006): 387–406. 4. For example, see O. R. Young, L. A. King, and H. Schröder, eds., Institutions and Environmental Change: Principal Findings, Applications, and Research Frontiers (Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 2008); and F. Biermann and P. Pattberg, “Global Environmental Governance: Taking Stock, Moving Forward,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 33 (2008): 277–94. Both papers summarize important insights related to the role of international agreements and organizations in global environmental governance. A closer look, however, reveals a limited understanding of the political and institutional implications of the rapid evolution of information and communication technology for sustainability governance. 5. F. Berkes et al., “Globalization, Roving Bandits, and Marine Resources,” Science 311 (17 March 2006): 1557–58; and O. R. Young et al., “The Globalization of Socio-ecological Systems: An Agenda for Scientific Research,” Global Environmental Change 16: 304–16. 6. J. Pierre and G. B. Peters, Governing Complex Societies (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 7. C. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin Books, 2008); and B. Bimber, A. J. Flanagin, and C. Stohl, “Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment,” Communication Theory 15, no. 4 (2006): 365–88. 8. K. E. Jones et al., “Global Trends in Emerging Infectious Diseases,” Nature 451 (21 February 2008): 990–94; and A. Costello et al., “Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change,” Lancet 373 (2009): 1693–733. 9. R. K. Plowright et al., “Causal Inference in Disease Ecology: Investigating Ecological Drivers of Disease Emergence,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6, no. 8 (2008): 420–29; and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-being–Health Synthesis (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2007). 10. Based on J. Spiegel et al., “Barriers and Bridges to Prevention and Control of Dengue: The Need for a Social-Ecological Approach,” EcoHealth 2, no. 4 (2005): 273–90. 11. J. Patz et al., “Unhealthy Landscapes: Policy Recommendations on Land Use Change and Infectious Disease Emergence,” Environmental Health Perspectives 112, no. 10 (2004): 1092–98; and D. Kapan et al., “Avian Influenza (H5N1) and the Evolutionary and Social Ecology of Infectious Disease Emergence,” EcoHealth 3, no. 3 (2006): 187–94. 12. Young, King, and Schröder, note 4. 13. I. Scoones and P. Forster, “The International Response to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza: Science, Policy and Politics,” STEPS Working Paper 10 (Brighton, UK: STEPS Centre, 2008). 14. C. Folke, T. Hahn, P. Olsson, and J. Norberg, “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems,”Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 441–73; and B. Low, E. Ostrom, C. Simon, and J. Wilson, “Redundancy and Diversity: Do They Influence Optimal Management?” in F. Berkes, J. Colding, and C. Folke, eds., Navigating Social-Ecological Systems (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 83–114. 15. A. Boin, P. ‘t Hart, E. Stern, and B. Sundelius, The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership under Pressure (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 16. P. Daszak and A. Chmura, The Role and Contribution of Biodiversity Science Expertise to Understanding and Illuminating Decision-Making on the Emergence and Spread of H5N1 Avian Influenza: Lessons for the International Communities as We Face This and Other Emerging Diseases Linked to Biodiversity Issues, report prepared for The Executive Secretariat of the Consultative Process Towards an International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise in Biodiversity Science (2007). 17. The 1851 International Sanitary Conventions are the origins to the current International Health Regulations. 18. J. Ginnsberg et al., “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data,” Nature 457 (19 February 2009): 1012–14. 19. C. C. Miller, “Putting Twitter's World to Use,” New York Times, 13 April 2009; D. Jeffries, “Information Outbreak,” The Guardian, 7 May 2009; C. Nutall, “Valley View: Technology Makes Us All Data-Gatherers,” Financial Times, 2 December 2008; and A. Madrigal, “Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early,” Wired Science, 29 April 2009, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/google-could-have-caught-swine-flu-early/ (accessed 1 August 2009). For an elaboration of “infoveillance,” see G. Eysenbach, “Infodemiology and Infoveillance: Framework for an Emerging Set of Public Health Informatics Methods to Analyze Search, Communication and Publication Behavior on the Internet,” Journal of Medical Internet Research 11, no. 1 (2009): e11. 20. Based on G. Harris, “Questions Linger over the Value of a Global Illness Surveillance System,” New York Times, 1 May 2009. 21. Garrett, note 1; and D. P. Fidler, SARS, Governance and the Globalization of Disease (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 22. A. Stinchcombe, Information and Organizations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 23. Fidler, note 21. 24. E. Mykhalovskiy and L. Weir, “The Global Public Health Intelligence Network and Early Warning Outbreak Detection,” Canadian Journal of Public Health 97, no. 1 (2006): 42–44; and S. Morse “Global Infectious Disease Surveillance and Health Intelligence,” Health Affairs 26, no. 4 (2007): 106–77. 25. Ibid. 26. Dr. David Heymann, director of the WHO Programme on Emerging and Other Communicable Diseases, in interview with the author, 25 March 2008. 27. Fidler, note 21. See also R. A. Cash and V. Narasimhan, “Impediments to Global Surveillance of Infectious Diseases: Consequences of Open Reporting in a Global Economy,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 78, no. 11 (2000): 1358–67. 28. M. S. Chwe, “Communication and Coordination in Social Networks,” Review of Economic Studies 67, no. 1 (2000): 1–16. 29. Heymann and Rodier, note 2. 30. P. S. Dodds, D. J. Watts, and C. F. Sabel, “Information Exchange and the Robustness of Organizational Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100, no. 21 (14 October 2003): 12516–21. 31. Quote from L. Garrett, “The Challenge of Global Health,” Foreign Affairs 86, no. 1 (2007): 14–38. See also P. Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). 32. Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, Achieving Sustainable Global Capacity for Surveillance and Response to Emerging Diseases of Zoonotic Origin: Workshop Report (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2008), 50.