In China, citizen scientists are using an app to monitor drinking water quality. In Kyrgyzstan, volunteers are tracking air pollution with advanced sensors. And in the United States of America, one organization is leveraging digital maps to help revive ailing landscapes.
What is the common thread between these high-tech efforts to protect the planet?
They’re all led by women, specifically the recipients of the United Nations highest environmental honours: the Champions and Young Champions of the Earth awards.
This year, International Women’s Day, which falls on 8 March, celebrates the women and girls who are leading the advancement of transformative technologies.
The day is designed to raise awareness about the often yawning digital divide between men and women. Globally, 327 million fewer women than men have a smartphone while women are under-represented in ICT jobs and academia, according to the Organization for Economic Development.
To mark International Women’s Day, we’re spotlighting five past Champions leading the technological charge against some of the planet’s biggest environmental threats.
Molly Burhans helps bring nature back
When Molly Burhans was 26, she learned that the Catholic Church was one of the world’s largest landowners but rarely inventoried its holdings.
So, she founded GoodLands to help religious communities map and manage their properties in a way that promotes sustainable development.
Burhans created the first digital map showing the global infrastructure of the Catholic Church and plans to help other large faith-based organizations conserve and restore lands marred by development. Projects like that are considered crucial as humanity has altered 75 per cent of the Earth’s surface, destroying many once-wild spaces and pushing 1 million species towards extinction.
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth a million,” said Burhans. “Our vision is to create the largest network for restoration in the world (and encourage) environmental stewardship.”
Xiaoyuan Ren charts China’s water quality
More than 300 million residents of rural China don’t have access to clean drinking water.
Xiaoyuan Ren was keen to help tackle this problem. She founded MyH2O, an app that tracks water quality in rural communities. MyH2O helps residents find clean water and connects communities with private companies and non-profit organizations that provide portable water solutions.
It relies on a nationwide network of youth volunteers who are trained to test water quality and log their results in an interactive platform.
“What motivates me is galvanizing others to take action,” she said. “We work with students studying science, technology, engineering and medicine. They will go on to develop careers in these fields and create solutions to some of the environmental problems they have seen while working with us."
The SeaWomen of Melanesia are saving coral reefs
Coral reefs the world over are under siege from climate change, overfishing and pollution. Since 2009 alone, almost 14 per cent of the world’s corals have disappeared, according to a 2020 report supported by the United Nations Environment Programme.
The SeaWomen of Melanesia are hoping to reverse that decline. The group’s 30-plus members chart the health of the fragile coral reefs that surround Melanesia, a grouping of island nations in the South Pacific, and work with local communities to protect and restore these underwater cities.
The SeaWomen undergo rigorous training in marine science, which is supplemented by practical lessons in reef survey techniques, including the use of GPS technology.
“When you train a woman, you train a society,” said Evangelista Apelis, co-director of the SeaWomen programme in Papua New Guinea. “We're trying to educate women, get women on board, so they can then go back and make an impact in their own families and their society as well."
Nzambi Matee gives plastic a second life
In 2017, Nzambi Matee quit her job as a data analyst and set up a small lab in her mother’s back yard. There, she began developing paving stones made from a combination of recycled plastic and sand. It would take her years to refine her formula but eventually, Matee developed robust plastic-based bricks that were cheaper and stronger than their cement counterparts.
Today, she leads Gjenge Makers, an up-and-coming Kenyan company that supplies plastic paving stones to schools across the country.
Matee’s work is helping to counter what experts have called an epidemic of plastic pollution. About 7 billion of the 9.2 billion tonnes of plastic produced from 1950-2017 became plastic waste, ending up in landfills or dumped.
“The negative impact we are having on the environment is huge,” said Matee. “It’s up to us to make this reality better.”
Maria Kolesnikova keeps tabs on Kyrgyzstan’s air quality
Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental health threats of our time, killing an estimated 7 million people a year.
While volunteering with MoveGreen, a youth-led environmental organization in Kyrgyzstan, Maria Kolesnikova became concerned about the poor air quality in Bishkek, home to roughly 1 million people and among the world’s most-polluted cities.
This inspired Kolesnikova and colleagues to deploy special sensors that measure the concentration of airborne pollutants, including the tiny particle PM2.5 and its larger cousin, PM10. Today, MoveGreen has more than 100 sensors spread across the country’s two largest cities – Bishkek and Osh – which pipe data to a smartphone app.
“We wanted to understand more about what was in the air that we are breathing, and what data the city was collecting in order to try and make things better,” said Kolesnikova, now the director of Move Green. “But we didn’t find any relevant, actual data. So, we decided to produce data ourselves.”
International Women’s Day, celebrated on 8 March, is an opportunity to recognize women and girls championing the advancement of transformative technology and digital education. The observance will explore the impact of the digital gender gap on widening economic and social inequalities, and it will spotlight the importance of protecting the rights of women and girls in digital spaces and addressing online and ICT-facilitated gender-based violence.
