Beyond ‘technical fixes’: Digital Dimensions of Nature Recovery conference provokes debate at the interface between theory and application

Beyond ‘technical fixes’: Digital Dimensions of Nature Recovery conference provokes debate at the interface between theory and application
Photos: Noemi Duroux Conference design: Karolina Uskakovych

Noemi Duroux, Lotti Jones, Caitlin Hafferty, and Jonathon Turnbull reflect on the 2024 Digital Dimensions of Nature Recovery conference, which created a vibrant, interdisciplinary space for knowledge sharing, posing difficult questions, and forming constructive alliances across science, policy, and practice in the UK and internationally. The following sections explore four interlinked themes around equity and justice, aesthetics and encounters, nature recovery in anthropogenic spaces, finance and governance.

The Digital Dimensions of Nature Recovery conference, held at the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub at Jesus College, Oxford, explored the intersection of digital technologies and nature recovery. Supported by the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery alongside the Agile Initiative, Tech Life Lab, the University of Nottingham, and the European Research Council’s BoS project, the conference welcomed an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners conducting nature recovery work at the interface of theory and application. The conference was co-organised by a team of early career researchers at the Digital Ecologies research group, led by LCNR researchers Dr Jonathon Turnbull and Dr Caitlin Hafferty.

Seven panels—spanning agriculture, monitoring, visualisation, remediation, urban nature, equity and justice, and financing—brought together diverse voices including farmers, engineers, biologists, economists, geographers, and artists. A key theme across these panels involved understanding the potential of digital technologies for repairing and restoring natural systems as existing within a complicated web of power relations.

As such, the tension between utopian and dystopian visions of technology were central to many discussions. Are digital technologies opening up, or closing down, possibilities for nature recovery? Such questions catalysed vibrant interdisciplinary dialogue around different (often contrasting and conflicting) interrogations of how digital tools, and processes of digitalisation, change and contribute to broader nature recovery efforts.

While digital tools were understood to inaugurate diverse relationships between different groups of people, and between people and nature—some positive, some negative—participants agreed that it is the work of practitioners, policy makers, researchers, and corporations to develop the appropriate political mechanisms to facilitate the fair and sustainable use of digital technologies for delivering nature recovery at scale.

The Digital Dimensions of Nature Recovery conference created important space for moving beyond polarising debates regarding ‘technical fixes’, where technology is either positioned as the ultimate solution or a barrier to nature recovery. During the event, attendees commented on the value of having this conference space to encounter radically different understandings and approaches to the digitisation of nature, challenging disciplinary and institutionalised assumptions, and provoking difficult questions at the interface between academic research and real-world applications.

Photos: Noemi Duroux Conference design: Karolina Uskakovych

Equity and Justice

Conference participants emphasised the importance of equity and justice in digitally enabled nature recovery. Tom August (UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology), Hope Steadman (University of Oxford), and Charlotte Chivers (Countryside and Community Research Institute) demonstrated how citizen science and citizen-led smart governance tools can be used to empower local communities, while Mark Hirons (on behalf of Eric Mensah Kumeh, University of Oxford) and Janet Fisher (University of Edinburgh) explored co-production techniques that integrate traditional knowledge and Indigenous science into digital mapping and restoration efforts. Martha Crockatt (University of Oxford) unpacked many of these issues in a practical, on-the-ground community mapping case study in the UK. Such approaches challenge prevalent notions that digital technologies lead to repressive forms of surveillance and gesture to how they may be hacked to prioritise inclusivity and human rights in nature recovery efforts.

At the same time, ethical concerns about digital technologies were discussed, particularly through speculative projects like Mana’olana, an AI interface that enables virtual conversations with other-than-human species—here, a whale. While thought-provoking, these tools raise questions about who designs and controls the algorithms that shape how digital technologies are used and experienced, and the biases and hegemonic power relations that may be encoded into them. Algorithmic justice was thus raised as an important concern for how digital technologies shape nature recovery practices, but also how they shape the stories we tell about nature and whose voices are included (or not) in such stories.

Bill Adams’ (University of Cambridge) presentation raised concerns that digital technologies can be employed for nefarious ends by those wishing to monitor or conduct surveillance on marginalised communities. Bill also extended his concern to how wildlife itself is tracked, managed, and controlled in an objectifying manner by many digital technologies, yet remained open to how technologies can be deployed otherwise. Chris Sandbrook’s (University of Cambridge) keynote talk similarly raised important questions about the role of AI in shaping equitable versions of nature recovery. While AI may make many conservation decisions more efficient, Chris raised a series of risks and unintended consequences that practitioners will have to face when using AI in nature recovery projects to ensure their fair and equitable use.

Photos: Noemi Duroux Conference design: Karolina Uskakovych

Aesthetics and Encounters

Another recurring theme raised by our presenters was the importance of aesthetics in shaping the politics of digital nature recovery. Whether through Eleanor Thomson’s AI-enhanced habitat mapping at Gentian Ltd., or Theo Stanley’s (University of Oxford) exploration of “technical wilderness” in natural capital projects, the presentations highlighted how digital tools generate powerful aesthetic visions that shape how ecologies are viewed by publics and professionals, opening new avenues for intervening and managing them.

Gillian Rose’s (University of Oxford) analysis of the online circulation of biodiversity data and images revealed how digital technologies blur boundaries between the real and the virtual, creating hybrid ways of seeing nature that are infused with the power dynamics encoded into algorithms. Far from tangential to nature recovery, then, aesthetics was understood by our participants as an important sphere wherein different ideas and visions of nature recovery are rendered palpable matters of ethical and political concern.

Jessica El Mal’s (University of Leeds) participatory art-research project, Forest of Cultures, demonstrated how digital platforms can embed culturally-specific and embodied connections with nature, illustrating how different, perhaps marginalised perspectives on nature can be rendered visible online. Our co-organiser Jennifer Dodsworth’s presentation used a range of digital methods to examine the dominant aesthetics associated with Cumbrian sheep farming online. Challenging some of these romantic representations, Jenny drew from her own experience as a sheep farmer and her research with other farmers to show how other aesthetics are possible on apps like Instagram where she curated a more situated vision of rural life.

Camille Bellet’s (University of Manchester) exploration of farmers’ tactile interactions with surveillance cameras showed how technologies can mediate sensory relationships with nonhuman animals beyond the screen. Jenske Bal (University of Liège) examined attempts to remediate biodiversity through nature-inclusive farming practices. And finally, Francois Thoreau’s (University of Liège) creative and poetic exploration of the aesthetics of AI-generated imagery raised critical questions about how these tools challenge traditional notions of pristine forms of nature that remain so powerful in nature recovery imaginaries.

Nature Recovery in Anthropogenic Spaces

The varying spatialities of nature recovery were also raised across a series of panels. Cities were highlighted as a neglected space of nature recovery policy and practice, while the role of agriculture was brought up in both rural and urban environments as a major driver of nature recovery. These panels challenged perceptions of where nature recovery can take place and with whom.

Elliott Newton from the NGO Citizen Zoo spoke about his rewilding practice in London, where he has reintroduced beavers to the capital (for the first time in 400 years). Ed Baker and John Tweddle presented on their work at the Natural History Museum in London where a host of technologies are being deployed to digitise nature across contexts, including in the Museum’s own grounds, providing a resource for researchers, practitioners, and the public. Tash Barnes (OnePlanet.com) played with the idea of the glitch to think about how rewilding might be done in urban spaces and enhanced by using technologies to foster communities of care and connection between people and place.

In relation to farming, Adam Searle from the University of Nottingham outlined work on high-rise agriculture (i.e., vertical farms) in Singapore, raising a host of questions regarding the hype and promise imbued in certain technologies that are sold as solutions to urgent agricultural questions. Adam highlighted how such ecomodern visions are mobilised otherwise by communities that envision alternative forms of nature recovery. Charlotte Chivers (Countryside and Community Research Institute) focused on citizen-led soil and water health monitoring, which is using a digital platform to record findings, while Jo Furtado (University of Exeter) looked at how participatory mapping and modelling on upland common land in the Lake District can aid in planning the management of land for nature recovery.

Photos: Noemi Duroux Conference design: Karolina Uskakovych

Finance and governance

Finance and governance underpin and continuously shape the encounters, spaces, and equitable dimensions of nature recovery, provoking both excitement and scepticism from the panellists and audience. Debates around financing nature’s recovery are frequently (and to an extent, unhelpfully) focused on a binary formulation of top-down neoliberal powers versus bottom-up, localised resistance. On one hand, financing mechanisms can either be over-emphasised as a solution to the biodiversity and climate crisis at the expense of other approaches (often with significant equity implications) or on the other hand can be downplayed, or entirely overlooked, through approaches that centre alternative approaches outside of neoliberalism. Moving beyond this, the panellists recognised a more complex and constructive reality involving diverse economies that involve collaborative associations, multi-level governance arrangements, negotiation between different priorities, and building capacity for shared outcomes between scientists, businesses, and communities.

Tom August (UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) began the discussions by highlighting how technology is leveraged for biodiversity monitoring through eco-acoustics, computer vision, and the power of citizen science. Despite considerable optimism towards the potential of technological innovation for monitoring, purely technological approaches cannot deliver nature’s recovery and face challenges regarding managing large volumes of data and interpreting results meaningfully. Grounding these issues, Molly Biddell (Knepp Estate) reflected on Knepp Estate’s pioneering approach to landscape restoration and data monitoring in the Weald to Waves recovery corridor and the River Adur Recovery project. Molly explained how new technologies and increasingly precise data collection is essential to ensuring that emerging carbon and nature markets are high-integrity in that they deliver multiple benefits, while mitigating greenwashing and ensuring social safeguards. High-integrity UK carbon and nature markets should also deliver co-benefits for people and nature, highlighted by Rosie Everett (Scottish Rural College) who noted that despite these aspirations, current finance mechanisms often overlook local communities and new approaches are needed to ensure direct community benefits for wider equitable outcomes.

Stepping back, the finance panel acknowledged that although technology holds great potential for unlocking new pathways to funding nature’s recovery, they cannot on their own solve deeper challenges in carbon and nature markets. Sophus zu Ermgassen (University of Oxford) brought these debates together, first outlining the opportunities for the voluntary carbon market and Biodiversity Net Gain in solving real-world problems, then diving deeper into their historic shortcomings that continue to lead to market failures. Sophus attributed these issues to governance weaknesses, arguing that technological innovation is a less important part of the solution and calling instead for broader reforms in political economy and governance structures.

Future Plans

The diverse themes raised across our panels are promising for the future of both scholarship and practice regarding the digital dimensions of nature recovery. Our participants opened important avenues for thinking beyond common binaries and tropes related to the use of digital technologies in the nature recovery sphere and among conservationists. For the most part, they resisted forms of both techno-utopianism (which champion digital technologies as technofix solution to all biodiversity issues) and techno-dystopianism (which paint technologies as severing humans from nature and being involved in forms of repressive surveillance). Equally, these critical concerns were not sidelined, but held in tension with the need to evaluate the use of technologies in diverse situated contexts.

Going forward, we hope to continue these interdisciplinary conversations, connecting policymakers, practitioners, and academics. We are currently developing the proceedings of the conference to be published as a special issue of People and Nature, a journal, we hope, will allow the insights generated at our event to be received by a broad scholarly audience and beyond.

For questions about the event, future plans, and how to get involved, please get in touch with Caitlin and Jonathon.