Realizing Technology’s Full Potential to Improve Energy and Environmental Policymaking

The world faces triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. We careen ever closer to—if not past—climatic tipping points, and face existential risks.

The UN Environment Programme has observed that what’s needed are policies that can keep pace with the current rate of environmental degradation. They need to “address the systems that are the root cause” and “contribute to the transformational change needed to achieve an environmentally sustainable world by 2050.”

Here in the U.S., after four years of climate leadership, real policy progress, and significant investment, we’re about to reverse course, and perhaps dismantle fact-based energy and environmental policymaking altogether.

The already urgent need for transformational climate policies will only grow as conditions inevitably worsen. The center of gravity for developing them may shift—to smart state governments here in the U.S., to other nations or groups of them, and perhaps even to the NGO and private sectors.

Policy leadership, wherever it comes from, must leverage technology.

In a new report for the Kleinman Center, I offer an introduction to the current revolutions in computing, remote sensing technologies, and data sciences, and how they are being applied to issues of sustainability.

These tools are being leveraged today to produce better descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive understanding of environmental issues—weather, air and water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, forest health, biodiversity, carbon management, ocean health, disaster management, energy security, and more. What if we could integrate these immensely valuable siloed systems into a greater systematic whole? And expand it as necessary? What insights could we derive? What synergies could be discovered? What policy improvements could be enabled?

Technology now presents an opportunity to build more sophisticated and comprehensive—transformational— environmental monitoring and evidence-based decision-making systems. They can enable more granular analyses of complex, interrelated environmental conditions, support the development of more effective and efficient policies, empower improved environmental justice outcomes, and provide the capacity for more effective compliance and enforcement activities.

With a commitment to capacity building among various publics as part of system design, all of this can be achieved while fostering citizen engagement and empowerment, more transparency, democratization of data, and greater government accountability.

The scale of effort and investment required to put all the pieces together and make this opportunity a reality calls for federal leadership, and partnering (or continuing to partner) with private companies, NGOs, academia, and other nations in technology and system development, deployment, operation, and maintenance.

In late 2023, the Biden administration pointed the federal government squarely in the direction of creating the kind of comprehensive capability described here, leading with The Federal Strategy to Advance an Integrated U.S. Greenhouse Gas Monitoring & Information System.

The strategy calls for integrating federal, commercial, NGO, and citizen science data in building “a systematic, unified approach to providing high-quality, transparent data and information across different geographic and temporal scales that meet user needs for actionable GHG emissions information.”  

Now, that strategy is far less likely to be pursued—much less replicated in a transdisciplinary way—by the federal government, at least.

Ongoing multinational, private, and NGO efforts described in the report, and recent policy drivers like the enactment of technology-enabled methane emissions regulations in the U.S. (now likely to be rolled back) and the European Union could help propel  more partnerships and collaborations. Still, someone needs to put the pieces together to achieve the larger goal. It could happen organically over time—but time is not on our side.

This work must be pursued with the urgency that global conditions demand. Who will lead it?

John Quigley

Senior Fellow, Kleinman Center

John Quigley is a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center and previously served on the Center’s Advisory Board. He served as Secretary of the PA Department of Environmental Protection and of the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.