The Power of Digital

Digital technologies and data utilization have significant potential to accelerate green transition. The true power of digital lies in its capacity to transform our mindset, actions, and value creation, rather than merely improving optimisation and efficiency, which often means excelling in the wrong areas. At UNDP, we strive to channel digital technology to reshape our understanding of the nature-human interaction, unlock access and benefit sharing to environmental finance for those in greatest need, empower local entrepreneurs through innovative business models, and foster collaborations among citizens, scientists, businesses, and policy makers through democratised open data.

A Transformative Force

As per the UNDP Digital Strategy 2.0, our vision is to create a world in which digital is an empowering force for people and planet, taking a whole-of-society approach. We leverage digital technologies and data to assist policy makers in developing data-driven solutions for nature and sustainable development across the Nature Pledge, while mitigating the unintended negative impacts such as e-waste, higher greenhouse gas emission and misinformation. UNDP will support the green and digital transformation journeys of countries in the following three ways, through the Green and Digital Twin Transition Support Programme and Digital 4 Planet Portfolio.

• Digital strategy and data policy support to the biodiversity sector

The true power of digital transformation lies in its ability to help change the way society value nature, leading to behavior change and new business models. UNDP will support the development and implementation of a digital strategy for the biodiversity sector, assisted by a whole-of-society Digital Readiness Assessments (DRA) to support countries unleash the power of digital to better collect and utilize novel data, ensure transparency, monitor nature, and implement smart environmental management between national and local actors. 

• Digital Public Infrastructure to unlock economic shift and green finance

Innovative digital public infrastructure (DPI) in the form of Nature ID - a data exchange system that can integrate diverse environmental, administrative and geospatial datasets - can quantify the value of natural ecosystems to inspire more nature-positive incentives and catalyze an economic shift in favour of nature-based solutions. By enabling society-wide participation in the digital economy, such DPI can expand access to financing mechanisms like Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) for local communities and farmers and make the impact of financial decision-making on nature more transparent. Nature ID can also improve traceability in agricultural and industrial supply chains, advance private sector disclosure and help safeguard the legal rights of Indigenous Peoples to their traditional lands.

• Empower local actors to enable data-driven policy and practice 

To deliver change at scale on the ground, digital technologies support the Policy & Practice shift through data-driven decision-making, natural resource monitoring with novel data such as earth observation or citizen science, automation with Artificial Intelligence, large-scale community engagement, and knowledge sharing. This includes sourcing and scaling up existing digital solutions especially with a south-south cooperation angle through mechanisms such as Ocean Innovation Challenge (OIC) and Digital X.