On Earth Day, 2024, Apodissi, a digital transformation, knowledge and technology SME participated in the UNDP webinar untapped.
The United Nations unveiled Untapped as its new research aimed at advancing efforts to address climate change. Erika Antoine, who leads communications at the UNDP Accelerator Labs, hailed it as a collective intelligence for climate action. The research is based on knowledge generated by the Accelerator Labs’ cutting-edge experiments in 115 countries, and an analysis conducted with the Nesta Center for Collective Intelligence on over 100 initiatives in the Global South.
The event brought together the UNDP Accelerator Labs’ founding investors, including the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany, the State of Qatar through the Qatar Fund for Development, and numerous Accelerator Labs around the globe. The objective was to hear from visionary leaders and investors whose bold vision has propelled the research, presented the findings, and discussed the way forward.
Collective intelligence, a synergy of technology, emerging data, and human knowledge, facilitates collaborative problem-solving, exemplified by initiatives like the Seeds4Needs Initiative. The Untapped Report identifies and addresses five climate action gaps: the data gap, which mobilises citizens to collect data about biodiversity, forests, and marine areas. The doing gap, closes the gap between words and action on climate. The diversity gap, brings a wide range of people and perspectives into climate processes and data collection, including indigenous communities. The distance gap, brings scientific knowledge and public experience closer together to create a shared understanding of a complex reality and the decision-making gap, helps navigate between conflicting views and creates opportunities to weigh trade-offs and find synergies.
Inspired by the innovative ideas presented in the Untapped report, Germany announced plans to host the Hamburg Sustainability Conference in October, as stated by Ms. Helge Elisabeth Zeitler, Director for European Union and Multilateral Development Policy at the German Ministry for Cooperation and Development.
Kathy Peach, Director and Co-Founder of Nesta’s Center for Collective Intelligence Design unveiled how collective intelligence can advance climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals, stating that “human ingenuity and this new approach to harness our world’s collective brainpower provide us with new hope to change climate futures across the globe.”
From the horn of Africa, Felix K. Mumba, Country Director in Charge of Water and Energy in Tana River County, and Lillian Njoro, Head of Experimentation at the UNDP Accelerator Labs in Kenya, described how extremes in flood and drought exacerbate water scarcity, leading to the holistic approach of the initiative, which relies on diversity of people and data. Among the successful applications of the approach is advocacy for the rehabilitation of non-functional boreholes in their community, resulting in over 2,000 households gaining access to water. Tyler Dzogbenyui Amaglo-Kobla, founder of the Smart Nature Freak Youth Volunteers Foundation in Ghana and Oceans Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup website, praised collective intelligence as a fantastic approach that interplays in making Ghana number one in the world to report on “Plastic Debris Density” (SDG indicator 14.1.1b).
In closing remarks, Gina Lucarelli portrayed the climate crisis as presenting tough decisions, emphasising the need to test ways to fill data gaps with lived experience, ethnographic studies, and satellite and drone data. She stressed, ‘It is not a choice between innovating and making tough decisions; rather, we must innovate to learn how to make these tough decisions’, which is the way forward.
To know more about Untapped report, clink on the LINK
