Dr Mehdi Snene
Senior Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Digital and Emerging Technology, UN-ODET
Meaningfully utilised, data can positively impact nations.
It begins with one measurement. A sensor clipped to a buried pipe records nothing more than sound. On its own, it’s meaningless.
Data’s impact
Multiply it by 75,000 and something changes. Across London, that many acoustic sensors listen to the water mains, up from last year’s 21,000. Machine learning separates the signature of escaping water from traffic, footfall and construction, while satellite imagery flags the soil disturbance a rupture leaves above ground. Two data streams, combined, roughly doubled detection accuracy.
Raise the scale, and that logic crosses a border. In the Amazon and Sumatra, solar-powered monitors listen from a canopy no satellite can see through. The models must learn a harder distinction: a falling branch from a two-stroke engine, ambient forest from an approaching truck. When the pattern matches, alerts reach indigenous patrol teams in minutes rather than at the end of a reporting cycle.
Capability may be abundant,
but reach is not, and reach is what cooperation delivers
Raise it once more, and it becomes planetary. Platforms such as Global Forest Watch fuse radar and optical feeds from public space agencies with climate data and ground observations, scanning millions of square kilometres and converting them into near real-time alerts. Multilateral bodies, national agencies and community monitors see the same alert on the same day.
Measure the distance travelled. Satellites have watched the tropics since the 1970s, but the picture arrived months late, in formats few institutions could read. Digital and emerging technologies have collapsed that lag from months to minutes.
Signal already exists; cooperation decides who hears it
Capability may be abundant, but reach is not, and reach is what cooperation delivers. Shared standards let an observation made in one system be read in another, so that a country need not rebuild what already exists.
Settled data governance determines who owns a recording and who controls an alert, questions no algorithm answers. Public infrastructure, from open satellite feeds to open models, keeps the raw material available to every state, not just those that can afford it. And capacity building decides whether an alert that lands in a ministry with no analysts is acted on or archived.
