Discovering TICTeC 2: Pryou Chung on fostering inclusive approaches to technological innovations for climate action
mySociety staffers Zarino, Gemma and Myf discuss the TICTeC Session “Fostering inclusive approaches to technological innovations for climate action”, in which Pryou Chung of East West Management Institute gave real life examples of how seemingly positive climate initiatives can go badly wrong when financial structures and baked in biases provide an incentive to overlook indigenous people. Watch Pryou’s presentation for yourself here. If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate. Transcript 0:05 Myf: I’m Myf, I’m Communications Manager at mySociety. Zarino: I’m Zarino, I’m the Climate Programme Lead at mySociety. Gemma: I’m Gemma, I’m mySociety’s Events and Engagement Manager. 0:16 Myf: We’re going to talk now about Pryou Chung from the East West Management Institute, and the name of the video is “Fostering inclusive approaches to technological innovations for climate action”, and that was a remote session at TICTeC 2024. 0:31 Gemma: Having a session that highlights the human rights risks involved with digital innovation in the climate space, and ways to navigate that, seemed especially important to include – and actually I don’t really remember us 0:45 having highlighted technology’s impact and effect on indigenous peoples at previous TICTeCs. Zarino: Yeah, so she was talking about two examples – one in Cambodia and one in Thailand – of places where local indigenous communities had 1:01 basically been excluded often intentionally from really fundamental decisions about how the climate crisis is being addressed in their area in ways that really would affect them: big infrastructure projects and 1:14 implementation of things like biodiversity credits, and she described them as like technocratic approaches to the climate crisis. Myf: You could feel warm and fuzzy and like everybody’s doing the right thing because they’re using these wonderful phrases: “carbon financing” and “biodiversity credits” and 1:32 all of these things, but there’s a bit of greenwashing going on there. Zarino: At one point she said, “Data’s not neutral”, which I really like, and she sort of explained how data and technology has been implemented to perpetuate the existing kind of imbalance of power. Myf: She was saying these inequalities are almost baked in, whether by design or just 1:51 because technology is coming from a world that just completely ignores indigenous populations. Zarino: There was one kind of thread through it which is something we’ve been thinking about at mySociety, around ownership of 2:05 data, or physical infrastructure – ownership of things like heat pumps. Ground source heat networks, for anyone who doesn’t know, are one of the more efficient alternatives to individual gas boilers in everyone’s homes, but they throw up really interesting questions about who 2:22 literally owns that physical infrastructure and so we were coming at it as mySociety from like, how can we bring communities together to take on shared ownership of an asset like a heat network that is literally, like, embedded in the streets around your estate or whatever? I think 2:38 it also applies to like the physical kind of infrastructure, like Pryou was talking about, she gave an example of a mangrove protection scheme and how communities were meant to look after these mangroves but they only got like 20% share of profits of what comes out of the mangroves, whereas somebody else – I 2:55 assume the organisations that set this up, or who invested in the first place -get 80%. Nice for them. I think one of the things we’ve been wondering is like, is there a fairer way to try and do that, through things like community share offers, or like local nonprofits and co-ops? Like are there ways we can use 3:11 Civic Tech to try and give those organisations a
