Abstract

Within the environmental field, there is a long history of public participation in research and data collection – from the participation in weather and climate records over the past 150 years, to the novel City Nature Challenge which uses the iNaturalist app and started in 2016. Yet, when we look through the history of modern environmental policy, the role of citizens as an equal creators of environmental knowledge is not recognised. In this talk, we will look at the history of environmental information over the past half a century. We will be able to notice the growing role of experts and digital tools, as well as the growing space for alternative actors to create and share knowledge. This provides the basis for a core question: should the public have the right to create environmental information?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328723000824

https://theoryandpractice.citizenscienceassociation.org/articles/10.5334/cstp.496

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25658-0_8

Biography

Haklay is a Professor of Geographic Information Science in the Department of Geography, University College London. He is also the co-director of the UCL Extreme Citizen Science group, which is dedicated to allowing any community, regardless of their literacy, to use scientific methods and tools to collect, analyse, interpret and use information about their area and activities.

In the late 1980s, he worked in a company that developed computer mapping systems on early personal computers (IBM PC with 80286 and 386 processors). He became interested in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and understood the need to have proper academic foundations in this area.  This has led him to pursue a BSc in Computer Science and Geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1994).

Through these studies, he became interested in the role of GIS in the context of environment and society. He heard first-hand reports on Rio conference in 1992, and got an award for a report on spatial aspects of environmental impact assessment during his undergraduate studies, which set him off on this direction. He continued with an MA in Geography (1997, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) with elements of computer science. He came to UCL to do his PhD in Geography (2002, UCL). In 2001 he joined UCL as a lecturer and promoted to a professor in 2011. Between 2001 and 2017 he was a member of the department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering.