The Digital Dimensions of Nature Recovery
The Digital Dimensions of Nature Recovery
November 7 – 8 2024
University of Oxford
Diverse digital technologies—from artificial intelligence and social media to satellite sensing and mapping applications—are touted as potential solutions to overlapping crises of the 21st Century, including the environmental and biodiversity crises and the pressing challenge of nature recovery. Nature recovery practitioners, alongside researchers from across the natural and social sciences, often widely and creatively deploy digital technologies and devices to monitor, model, and forecast environmental change, embracing the promise of the digital for managing and governing nature. Simultaneously, researchers continue to both utilise and critically examine the power of digital media as a means to understand and generate representations of nature, while developing critical approaches to the study of digital technologies and their relationship to nature recovery. Bringing together those who actively engage with and apply digital solutions for environmental issues with others who emphasise the complex and potentially problematic considerations of these same tools will create and catalyse constructive and dynamic new ways of thinking through the role of digital approaches to nature recovery.
This two-day conference brings together interdisciplinary researchers across the University of Oxford and internationally, with a community of practitioners and policymakers, to critically explore the digital dimensions of nature recovery through a simultaneously conceptual and applied lens.
Leveraging the Digital Ecologies research group’s embeddedness within UK nature recovery communities, organisations, and initiatives, this conference is designed to create space for bringing together a wide range of voices, highlighting the complex and potentially problematic implications of digital tools, while exploring opportunities for pragmatic and actionable suggestions for decision-makers. We hope this conference will facilitate knowledge exchange and explore the co-production of innovative solutions for nature recovery through a digital lens, while supporting new connections and discussions between a diverse range of academics, policymakers and practitioners.
The Digital Dimensions of Nature Recovery conference is organised by the Digital Ecologies research group, a group of early career researchers seeking to bridge conversations between more-than-human and digital geographies, media studies, and political ecology. The conference is principally funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, the Digital Hub at Jesus College, the Agile Initiative, the SoGE’s Research and Culture Fund, the Technological Life research cluster, the European Research Council’s BoS Project, and the University of Nottingham.
The conference took place at the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub, Jesus College, University of Oxford on 7th and 8th November, 2024.
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