In my former role developing climate justice strategy at U.S. telecom company Verizon, we looked deeply into the role of technology in not only helping advance climate resilience for those vulnerable to physical or transition risks of climate change, but how technology can work in favor of underrepresented communities. This was motivated by Verizon’s aspirations as a technology company – we looked at technology and social innovation through technology as very much material issues. We found many opportunities there – and a lot of pitfalls as well. On the pitfalls side, technology is very often controlled by dominant groups (those with resources, education, access – think Silicon Valley), and co-creation of equitable technologies with communities remains a bit of a fantasy. We created a technology accelerator in Climate Justice (Forward For Good: Climate Justice Cohort) but were not successful in surfacing the work of many founders of color or frontline communities. We were more successful in threading that needle in our later work launching the Verizon Climate Resilience Prize, where we learned from our earlier mistakes not prioritizing founders from frontline communities.
On the social technology side, I have been inspired by the work of the U.S. startup ISeeChange (one of the startups from the Verizon Forward for Good Accelerator), which essentially mobilizes people in climate change-impacted communities as “sensors” reporting the changes they see in their environments, whether from heat, flooding, drought, etc. Their platform functions like a social network and empowers individuals to report what they’re seeing at the ground level, not rely on underfunded agencies or overextended emergency responders to get it right. Their business is mostly fee-for-service at the moment doing stakeholder engagement for large engineering and public works projects, but their potential (and ambition) is much larger.