The environment has been hacked! In a good way.

Across four different time zones, technologists and environmentalists recently converged at the first global EcoHack, with events in San Francisco, New York City, São Paulo and Madrid. Their mission? Spend twenty-four hours building tools to protect and better understand the natural environment. Hackathons are popular events that bring together developers, designers, and other technologists to collaborate intensively on software projects. EcoHack expands that model to include scientists and environmentalists, all programming to protect the planet.

The World Resources Institute was a proud sponsor of EcoHack, which took place from May 9th to May 10th. Organizers included members of WRI’s Data Lab, and CartoDB, an official Global Forest Watch partner. EcoHack was also part of the Obama administration’s Climate Data Initiative (read more here.

In his opening remarks at EcoHack New York, Craig Hanson, director of Food, Forests, and Water programs at WRI, highlighted the growing importance of tech in environmental conservation. He argued that while governments are gridlocked and companies slow to shift business practices, technology can inspire the rapid behavioral change we urgently need.

And we have more data, processing power, and connectivity than ever to help us tackle the complex problems on Earth, from climate change to waste to sustainable cities. Nowhere is it more apparent than at EcoHack: the future of the environmental movement lies in a combination of big data, radical transparency, and a networked world. A number of high-profile efforts showcase this trend:

• Just a few months after its February launch, Global Forest Watch has already motivated governments and companies to tackle the forest fires in Sumatra.
• Aqueduct has been deterring companies and banks from investing in new manufacturing facilities where water supplies are already stressed.
• Crowdsourcing in India is taking on bribery in government agencies.
• SkyTruth has harnessed crowdsourcing and satellite imagery to monitor hydraulic fracturing, offshore oil exploration and illegal fishing.
• And many indigenous peoples have begun defending their territories using mobile phones and the Internet.

But the objective of EcoHack is not to solve all the world’s environmental problems in one weekend. Rather, EcoHack aims to jump-start projects, prototyping ideas that can be further developed or have a continuing impact. It is a quick convening of creative energy, just to get things and people moving. Participants submit ideas to the EcoHack and gather a team at the event to help carry out their vision. The resulting efforts often contribute to ongoing environmental campaigns. For example, previous years’ EcoHack projects (including this forest loss animation and geo-tagged Mongabay.com stories) contributed to the Global Forest Watch website. Projects from this year’s EcoHack include:

• OpenLogging, a project that lets users trace logging roads onto Open Streetmap using satellite imagery. A team from the World Resources Institute and Moabi created a platform to identify the location and extent of roads impacting forests deep in the Congo Basin.
• WattTime, started at EcoHack 2013, analyzes real-time energy data to help shift consumption to times when the grid is “green” (and power is generated from renewable sources). This year, WattTime added support for the water and carbon impact of energy generation.
• Rainforest Connection uses old Android phones to listen for and alert authorities to chainsaw use in forests. Their project added real-time SMS alerts and built an Android app for park rangers.
• Yale Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks how well countries perform on high-priority environmental issues. The EcoHack team created an API for EPI data as well as interactive data visualizations. Be sure to check out some of the other projects from San Francisco and New York.

For better or for worse, environmentalism has taken a turn for the technical. Monitor, model, predict, visualize, scale, prototype are the slogans of 21st century developers and environmentalists alike. Of course, the hackathon model is no panacea for our environmental ills. But it is a powerful complement to long timelines for business sustainability, clunky bureaucracy, and endless fundraising that can hamstring action on environmental conservation.

Interested in getting involved with EcoHack in the future? Please contact WRI’s Data Lab, where it's EcoHack every day.

Alerts of forest disturbance from MODIS imagery

The title of the journal says it all. Applied earth observation. We built the system to detect forest clearing activity at a time scale commensurate with economic decisions. The 16-day updates provide a guide for field researchers to find and stop undue deforestation.

A strange thing to read, maybe, from the data team at an institution whose mission is to "move human society to live in ways that protect the Earth's environment." But the objective of any good think tank (and WRI is good) is to offer information that can actually be incorporated into policy.

This post is inspired by the curmudgeonly report of Princeton's Jeff Hammer, who writes that economists are failing policy makers in poor countries. Hammer reports that the Chief Minister of Punjab, Pakistan (population: 101 million) recently asked a room full of development economists, "Should I put more money into transport?"

This isn't like the age-old question of how many development economists does it take to screw in a light bulb. This is more like how many development economists does it take ... to do their job. Turns out, it doesn't really matter, because all that comes back is an array of disconnected results from randomized control trials.** And this array can't answer the Chief Minister's question.

Ok, so full disclosure: I am Jeff Hammer's son, Dan Hammer, and I am a PhD student in environmental economics. I am biased. (Although the direction of bias is unclear, since I spent my teenage years defying everything he said.) Still, his point is part and parcel of a broader criticism of the trajectory of development economics, including from prominent economists like Lant Pritchett and Angus Deaton.

So what? Why should this matter for the Data Lab? An objective of the Data Lab is to equip economists with information so that they can better evaluate tradeoffs. It is hard enough to know where to allocate scarce resources with perfect and common information on the resources. How much do we have? What is the value of these resources? It is way, way harder to answer these fundamental questions with imperfect and asymmetric information on resources. That is, it is not in the mandate of the Data Lab to inform policy makers directly, but we can collect and process data to make more information more available to more people.

Environmental conservation is just one element of a broad set of social objectives. And resources are constrained. The objective of the Data Lab is not to identify how to allocate resources, but rather to substantively help those who do.

** So, sure, I am not saying that RCTs are all bad. There is value to be gained from examining human behavior in very, very specific situations, especially when positioned in a broader behavioral framework. It is a good thing that this footnote is near the comment section, since this is where I might get lambasted -- and lose all hope at an academic position. The point of the post is to demonstrate why we the Data Lab care so much about open and accessible information, not necessarily to wade into the RCT fray without pants on. And also to support the economists who can answer the Chief Minister's basic question.