Mind the gaps: Information inequality and environmental knowledge
Anyone studying environmental issues in the Middle East will tell you: The region is plagued by non-existent, unreliable, or inaccessible data. This poses any number of questions for researchers and journalists: How do we unearth and verify information in what Synaps has called “the data wasteland”? What topics should we be prioritizing, and in what formats? Whose behavior are we hoping to change, in countries where both national governments and Western donors are part of the problem? A Tunisian activist nicely summed up her lack of interest in Western-facing advocacy: “I don’t really believe in trying to convince European governments to be less colonialist than they are.”
This coming Tuesday 17 September, from 2-4pm Beirut time, I have the luxury of talking through these and other questions with a panel of four brilliant colleagues: Maya Gebeily, Lina Ghoutouk, Dana Hourany, and Fadi El-Jardali. Each approaches the challenge of environmental knowledge production from a unique angle: in English or Arabic, journalism or academia, local or international settings. I’d love to see you there, whether online or in-person. You can register here!
For now, a few thoughts to get you (and me) thinking on the nature of these imbalances:
As I read up on environmental discussions in the United States, I’m periodically blown away by the volume and quality of information that exists on extremely specific problems. We possess, for example, authoritative data on how specially engineered wildlife crossings can reduce the rate at which drivers crash into deer. We know how “deer-vehicle collisions” vary from one season to the next and have even coined acronyms to discuss roadkill more efficiently: DVCs for deer, WVCs for wildlife generally. All of which belongs to a scientific discipline, road ecology, that I only recently learned existed.
By contrast, in Lebanon—like much of the Middle East, North Africa, and the “Global South” broadly—we lack basic information about the water we shower with, the air we breathe, the produce we eat. Have a look, for example, at this open-source map of air quality monitors globally:
In Egypt, a country of 110 million, the lone monitor is at the US Embassy in Cairo. Iraq has two, one of which is also at the US Embassy. The only information-dense areas are in Israel and the United Arab Emirates, two wealthy countries pitching themselves as tech and climate hubs. (Jordan is catching up, notably in Amman.)
What explains the size of these gaps? Plenty of data simply does not exist, thanks to a mix of underinvestment, institutional breakdown, and the suppression of independent civil society and knowledge production. In other cases, data exists but is not accessible to the public. Authoritarian regimes may jealously guard information on water scarcity, which they view as both a reputational liability and a matter of national security.
Other officials have access to data but no resources to act upon it. I’ll never forget the story of a Lebanese mayor who commissioned tests of his village’s water quality… only to sit on the results: “It’s so bad I just can’t share the outcomes with my constituents, until I have solutions to propose to them. What’s the point of making them panic?”
As climate change looms larger on global agendas and aid budgets, there’s been a palpable uptick in writing and conferences on MENA’s environment. The resulting ecosystem is increasingly dynamic, but glaring gaps persist. International funding streams favor English over Arabic language knowledge production, shaping whose stories get told for which audiences. Local media coverage is scarce, while international portrayals too often veer between caricatured extremes: On one side are parched deserts destined to churn out waves of climate refugees; on the other are glistening petrostates advancing utopian visions of space travel alongside cloud seeding. A growing body of academic literature offers more depth and balance, but is often inaccessible to readers who can’t pay for access or parse dense technical language.
Critically, the imbalance in access to information is not only between rich and poor countries. It is also within rich nations. In the US, less affluent communities—notably communities of color—often have inferior access to environmental data, although they are disproportionately affected by pollution and extreme weather. Hence this harrowing ProPublica investigation into how the Environmental Protection Agency systematically fails to inform low-income communities of the toxic pollutants emanating from nearby factories. Put otherwise: In the money- and data-rich US, black communities often know less about the poison they are breathing than road ecologists know about how a particular species of deer reacts to a particular kind of bridge.
Of course, a core difference between the US and most of MENA is that the former has far more money available for non-profit news outfits like ProPublica—and much more space to directly criticize state policies. That’s not to say that nothing can be done here in the region: On the contrary, it’s all the more reason to take the time to listen to and learn from those who have been finding their way amid these constraints.