CINITDIEN - Championing INnovation In The DIgital ENvironment

The Digital Economy already represents a substantive part of the UK economy, and this importance will increase over the immediate future. The UK Government has recognised the importance of the Digital Economy, supporting numerous activities and initiatives. Harnessing the potential of the Digital Environment will ensure that NERC science, capitalising on the substantial NERC investments in digital and sensor infrastructure, becomes solution-driven, delivering impact not only to traditional impact stakeholders such as policymakers and implementation bodies (e.g. Defra, EA, Natural England) but also engaging and leveraging considerable industrial know-how to co-develop these solutions. Industry engagement is also critical, in our view, to develop the digital solutions that will become more widely available to a wide range of users, from local councils, to nature partnerships, as well as to the science community in academe, policy and agencies. Too many efforts and solutions in the environmental digital science community are developed by the scientific community for the scientific community, having only a limited policy relevance, but with no real practical outlet for these tools in the real world.

The programme, and position of Digital Environment Champion is an opportunity to change not only how NERC and UK science and policy community use, interact with and benefit from the knowledge and understanding that comes from data arising from sensor networks, combined with models and data science tools, but also how the wider community engages with, and benefits from this substantial investment.

The programme as described would draw across a number of digital platforms and initiatives to ensure a wide participation of the various communities active in the Digital Environment, from mathematicians and statisticians, to modellers, data scientists, software engineers and sensor specialists. It would also be solution-focused, and solution-driven, engaging with current policy challenges but whilst ensuring that the solutions envisioned prove useful to a wide range of end-users, from policy development to implementation, from academic pursuit to the environmental commercial sector.

It is in fact a challenge to distinguish adequately between stakeholders and beneficiaries, as all the academic communities active in the Digital Environment Programme are both beneficiaries of the outcome of the programme and the Digital Environment champion role, as well as stakeholders in the programme. The same can be said of policy makers, professional practitioners and commercial entities. However, the principle benefits arising are expressed thus:

1) a far more effective, robust and informative environmental modelling and data science community, with a deeper and wider engagement from the mathematical and statistical communities;
2) a more secure, and better-informed policy making community, as the Digital Environment programme develops solutions to policy needs, both now and in the future;
3) better-equipped and rounded professionals serving in the areas of policy design, implementation and practice. The programme envisioned in the proposal, would deliver a roadmap to transforming the Digital Environment towards delivering solutions and tools that are accessible and usable by professionals in the environmental field, so ensuring that the best possible tools are being used to support decision making across a range of scales, for example from housing development and critical infrastructure decisions to flood defence and associated land resource planning.