Suchergebnisse

Increasing pressure on shared water resources has often been a driver for the development and utilisation of water resource models (WRMs) to inform planning and management decisions. With an increasing emphasis on regional decision-making among competing actors as opposed to top-down and authoritative directives, the need for integrated knowledge and water diplomacy efforts across federal and international rivers provides a test bed for the ability of WRMs to operate within complex historical, social, environmental, institutional and political contexts. This paper draws on theories of sustainability science to examine the role of WRMs to inform transboundary water resource governance in large river basins. We survey designers and users of WRMs in the Colorado River Basin in North America and the Murray-Darling Basin in southeastern Australia. Water governance in such federal rivers challenges inter-governmental and multi-level coordination and we explore these dynamics through the application of WRMs. The development pathways of WRMs are found to influence their uptake and acceptance as decision support tools. Furthermore, we find evidence that WRMs are used as boundary objects and perform the functions of 'boundary work' between scientists, decision-makers and stakeholders in the midst of regional environmental changes.

Abstract
Chatbots have emerged as a potent artificial intelligence (AI) tool for expediting expert knowledge, including evidence used for conservation research and practices. While digital technologies can support the curation and analysis of vast amounts of conservation datasets to inform best practices, AI-driven solutions raise ethical concerns around what source of evidence is used or not. This paper examines the ethical issues around sources, biases, and representation of conservation evidence formulated by chatbots. We interviewed two versions of ChatGPT, GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4, regarding knowledge available for ecological restoration and analysed 40,000 answers. Our results show that these chatbot developments are expanding the inclusion of diverse data sources and improving the accuracy of the responses. However, these technical developments do not necessarily imply ethical considerations in terms of fair representation and unbiased inclusion of diverse knowledge offered by different sources of expertise. While the updated model expands the descriptions ofgeographical locations and organizations, there remain limitations regarding equitable representation of different expertise and stakeholders. The updated version of GPT still relies heavily on evidence from high-income countries (88%), North American expertise (67%), and male academics (46%) with limited contributions from minority groups, such as Indigenous organizations (10%) and low-income countries (2%). In conclusion, the ethical implications within generative AI reveal the crucial requirement of human-centered negotiations to consider how knowledge practices are legitimized and embedded in the development and use of chatbots.

Indigenous land and sea management (ILSM) has been the focus of large government investment in Australia and globally. Beyond environmental benefits, such investments can deliver a suite of social, cultural and economic co-benefits, aligning with the objectives of Indigenous communities and of governments for culturally appropriate socio-economic development. Nevertheless, there have been very few studies done on the spatial distribution of this investment and the extent to which its associated co-benefits address socio-economic disadvantage, which is unevenly distributed across Australia. This study draws on Australian ILSM programmes to examine the spatial and temporal distribution of investment for ILSM between 2002–2012 and considers implications for the distribution of associated co-benefits. Mapping and analysis of 2600 conservation projects revealed that at least $462M of investment in ILSM projects had occurred at 750 discrete sites throughout Australia. More than half of this investment in ILSM has been concentrated in northern Australia, in disadvantaged remote and very remote areas where a high percentage of the population is Indigenous, and Indigenous land ownership extensive. Our research has shown that ILSM investment has successfully been spatially distributed to areas with high needs for multiple social, economic, environmental and health and well-being co-benefit outcomes.