Knowledge Technologies for Democracy

AI and big data are fundamentally interwoven into our societies, culture and conceptions of democratic governance and exchange. They pose risks to our democracies at the same time as they have the potential to enhance it. KT4D will explore how these technologies can foster more inclusive civic participation in democracy, and how AI and big data can facilitate new democratic innovations and enrich democratic deliberation within participatory fora. To achieve this, we will develop and validate tools, guidelines and a Digital Democracy Lab demonstrators platform. These results will be validated across three user needs scenarios: 1) building capacity for citizens and citizen-facing Civil Society Organisations; 2) creating regulatory tools and services for Policy and CSOs; and 3) improving awareness of how to design ethical and democratic principles in academic and industrial software development.

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NewWorkTech

People with disabilities have the potential to engage with advanced technology. However, it is essential to identify the elements that successfully enable individuals with disabilities to interact with technology. With this context, the EU-funded NewWorkTech project enhances the work-related capacities of both individuals with disabilities and the general workforce, focusing on technology-mediated tasks and interactions. It involves empirical research on how people with disabilities (who often lead in technology use) perform functions at work, alongside theoretical innovations related to technology and socio-material assemblages. The project will provide policy recommendations, develop new tech solutions and actively engage people with disabilities, adhering to the principle of ‘nothing about us without us.’

Understanding and Responding to Complex Climate-Health Emergencies

Complex climate-health emergencies are crises caused by co-occurring and compounding medical, social, political, and environmental risks that overwhelm health systems. Climate change is a major emerging driver of these emergencies, intersecting with diverse regional and global challenges such as biodiversity loss, land degradation, food and nutrition insecurity, and emerging diseases. Indigenous Peoples who make up 5% of the global population have been badly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. The overarching aim of this research programme is to document, understand, and monitor the factors affecting the creation, evolution, and impact of complex climate-health emergencies among Indigenous communities in the Global South, examining the interaction between climatic and non-climatic stresses, and co-generating knowledge and capacity to build resilience in health systems and support pilot interventions.

KEEPCARING

KEEPCARING aims to (re-)build wellbeing and resilience of the healthcare workforce in EU hospitals in the surgical pathway, to promote onboarding as well as staying in the workplace by systematically researching factors and signals of job stress and novel mitigating solutions and by co-creating a multi-faceted non-digital, digital and AI-supported solution package to prevent burnout among (aspirant) healthcare professionals on the individual, team, and organisational level. Warwick is investigating the ethics of AI use in healthcare settings as part of this project.

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Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network: The Food-Health-Climate Nexus

Indigenous Peoples globally face profound threats from climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation — threats that are rooted in discrimination, land dispossession, and colonization, and span all of the IPCC’s representative key risks. It is primarily through the nexus with Indigenous food systems that these stresses converge and interact to affect health and well-being. Indigenous knowledges and practices underpin resilience across the food-climate-health nexus, yet they are overlooked and undermined by government policy. New ways of working with Indigenous communities and informing decision making are needed if we are to make sense of and address these interlinked stresses. The Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON) transforms and rethinks how we understand the food-climate-health nexus from the bottom-up, building on multiple ways of knowing embodied in Indigenous knowledges and science, and in ways that strengthen community resilience to multiple stresses and support actions that benefit Indigenous Peoples. The project works with research, policy and Indigenous partners in Canada, US, India, Uganda, Ghana, South Africa, Germany, Namibia, Australia, and Peru.

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GRECO

GRECO will introduce the food packaging industry to groundbreaking bio-based, SSbD, and fully circular PLA-based materials, that meet diverse application needs. These alternatives aim to replace fossil-based, complex, and multimaterial structures prevalent in the industry, improving packaging end-of-life through biodegradation in various environments like industrial and home compostability, anaerobic, marine, and soil. The design will ensure recyclability and avoiding of chemical interactions that hinder overall biodegradation. GRECO aims to demonstrate the life cycle and techno-economic feasibility of greener & safer bioplastics value chains for the food packaging sector, based on a safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) strategy. To this aim, innovative bio-based, biodegradable, and recyclable packaging based on new PLA copolymers, coatings, additives and catalysts accompanied by surface treatments will be produced. Regulatory compliance will be demonstrated while contributions to new or modified standards and proper labelling will be proposed. GRECO is a collaboration between research, innovation and policy partners from Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Slovenia, France, Finland, Netherlands, Thailand, and Turkey. IERG will work on Work Packages around ethics and user engagement as part of the project.

HYDROHEAL

Bone atrophy and fractures, resulting from trauma, infections, osteoporosis, or cancer, are global health concerns. Standard care with cement and bone grafts has limitations. Synthetic polymers like polymethyl methacrylate risk leakage, spinal issues, and poor healing. Donor shortages for allogenic bone grafting and invasive procedures pose risks such as rejection and viral transmission. HYDROHEAL innovates with hydrogel formulations to address bone strength challenges by treating vertebral and alveolar fractures. HYDROHEAL aims to develop safe, sustainable scaling, and cost-effective formulations using renewable biomaterials for targeted drug delivery, aligning closely with the EU Circular Economy Action Plan and Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability. The self-solidifying hydrogels release active pharmaceutical ingredients locally upon external stimulation, potentially improving treatment efficacy, preventing infections, and speeding up fracture healing. HYDROHEAL is a collaboration between research, innovation and policy partners from Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Portugal, Ireland and Germany. IERG will work on ethics and user engagement as part of the project.

Future Democracy

Future Democracy investigates how democracy can be shaped to address the challenges posed by technological development and climate change. In particular, it asks what sort of democratic innovations can address short-termism in democracy, foster responsiveness to local needs, and foster international cooperation. Various forms of citizens assemblies and future-oriented institutions are considered, along with technological enhancements to democratic arrangements.

Governing AI and Biotech Risk

Advances in emerging technology including artificial intelligence and biotechnology will transform the security and economic landscape. Governing AI and Biotech Risk explores the ethical, political and psychological underpinnings of effective governance that can meet the challenges posed by technological risks.

Supporting Just Response and Recovery to COVID-19 in Informal Urban Settlements

The project works with the organisation Slum Dwellers International and its Youth Federation members in eight Sub-Saharan African cities (Lagos, Freetown, Nairobi, Lusaka, Harare, Johannesburg, Gqeberha and Cape Town) to understand inequalities and injustices associated with COVID-19 impacts and policy responses in informal urban settlements. The project will facilitate the creation of a series of video-diaries informed by ethical analysis, co-designed and produced with youth groups in the cities, which will provide the foundation for research articles and policy work with local authorities.

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The COVID Observatories: Monitoring the interaction of pandemics, climate risks, and food systems

Indigenous Peoples are believed to be at particularly high risk from COVID, exacerbated by climate risks and socio-economic stresses. There is emerging evidence that national responses to the pandemic are compounding the vulnerability of Indigenous Peoples, exacerbated by little—if any—understanding on the unique pathways through which COVID will affect them. This project addresses this knowledge and policy gap by documenting, monitoring, and examining how COVID is interacting with multiple stresses to affect the food systems of Indigenous Peoples globally, and by examining issues of ethics and justice associated with policy responses. The project works with 20 Indigenous peoples in 13 countries.

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Inserting Ethics into Adaptation and Resilience Policy

The project is a collaboration with the University of Cape Town and with Cape Town city’s climate adaptation department to look at how issues of ethics and justice can be incorporated into responses to climate-related risks and city policymaking more generally. Cape Town has already come perilously close to a city-wide drought and regularly suffers from flooding: the project seeks to ensure that the most vulnerable communities such as informal settlements are incorporated in an ethical manner into city-level protection plans. By doing so, it aims to model a pathway to inserting ethics into adaptation and resilience policy that can be utilised in other settings.

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Technological Risks in Development

Food insecurity poses a major risk to human lives and well-being in the Global South, especially in the face of climate change. In this project, we investigate how technologies that have been introduced as solutions to food insecurity have contributed to the creation of new risks, and ask how such technologies should might be governed ethically to reduce these risks. We focus on the loss of biodiversity as a result of the introduction of GMO crops, and the rise of antimicrobial resistance as a result of the overuse of antibiotics to combat communicable diseases in crops and livestock.

New Approaches to Equitable Resilience

A variety of behavioural and structural factors impact individuals’ ability to think and act in resilient ways. Based on field research in Kenya, the first aim of this project is to shed new light on key psychological factors that drive resilience, and determine whether this information can facilitate predictive modelling of resilient behaviour. The second aim of the project is to understand the ethical implications of individual differences in resilient behaviour. For example, are there reasons to direct particular attention and resources to those who, by virtue of psychological characteristics, do not easily adopt resilient behaviours?

Challenging Inequalities: An Indo-European Perspective

Challenging Inequalities is an interdisciplinary collaboration across humanities and social sciences, with participants from India, UK, France and Norway. The project seeks to integrate cutting edge philosophical work on the salient ethical dimensions of inequality with social scientific approaches, both quantitative and qualitative, to measuring and addressing inequality in international development contexts. It examines inequality from three different perspectives. First, the project addresses how inequality should be defined and measured. Second, the project looks at attitudes to inequality and inequality-reducing policies. Third, the project investigates the experience of inequality and looks at the effects of inequality on livelihoods and policy interventions.

Climate Change and Urban Violence

The two challenges of urban violence and of climate change adaptation for urban development in the Global South have been of increasing concern to the humanitarian, security, and development communities. But these two challenges have so far been treated in parallel, without a strong analytic basis for understanding the interlinkages between the two, and implications for policy interventions in both fields. The aim of the project is to develop new understanding about the interactions between urban violence and climate change risks in urban areas of the Global South. Climate and development policy in areas of urban violence raises a number of difficult ethical questions about legitimacy and authority, and about the ethics of working with ‘gangs’, which are at the core of the project.

Why We Disagree about Resilience

The concept of resilience is increasingly used in urban planning and disaster risk reduction. While resilience may appear consensual to some, disagreements exist regarding what urban resilience should look like. Some approaches to resilience focus on infrastructure and materials, whereas other approaches are more inclusive of social and environmental concerns. WhyDAR identified different ways in which urban resilience is understood while investigating the role of science, technology, ethics and expertise in the making of resilience strategies in the Global South. It examined key ethical questions arising from disagreement about conceptions to resilience, and asked what an equitable approach to resilience would look like in the face of this disagreement.

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Remedying Injustice in Indigenous Climate Adaptation Planning

Indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to risks associated with climate change, yet their voices are often marginalised in climate adaptation planning. This project investigated ethics and equity aspects of the relationship between indigenous communities, climate change, and adaptation policies, bringing together both philosophical and social scientific research. It asked how adaptation policies that integrate indigenous voices into climate adaptation planning can work to reduce the unequal and inequitable distribution of climate impacts on indigenous populations. The project worked closely with collaborators at Makerere University and the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change research network, and included fieldwork with Batwa Indigenous communities in South West Uganda.

Tackling Climate-related Health Risks in Urban Slums: an Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Challenge of Integrating Local and Scientific Knowledges

Many urban populations in the Global South live in slums with poor access to sanitation and clean drinking water. Changes to the local and global climate threaten to exacerbate these health risks; flooding increases exposure to infectious diseases, while droughts threaten food supplies. To help these challenges, this project developed a new framework for integrating different knowledges in the context of climate-related health risks in slums. We combined philosophical analysis of the concept of expertise, empirical research in Zambia on traditional ecological knowledge, and medical knowledge of urban slum health.