ID: 2034
Presenting Author: Kolbeinn Hilmarsson
Session: 650 - From field to boardroom: digital IA beyond initial permitting
Status: pending
Explores how human behavior, bias, and digital tools intersect in shaping credible, bottom-up nature reporting and why technology alone will never be enough.
Even in the age of AI, satellites, and sensors, the most valuable part of environmental data is still human. The people who collect, interpret, and visualize information in the field shape how and whether that data ever influences real-world decisions.
Yet too often, critical insights get lost between field notes, static reports, and executive dashboards.
Experience from the aviation industry offers a useful parallel. The digitization of repetitive, safety-critical data transformed the industry but only after addressing the human challenges of adoption, trust, and bias. The same dynamics now define the digital transformation of environmental data. In shaping global frameworks for corporate nature reporting, it has become clear that people operate at different altitudes of understanding.
Corporate systems think top down, analyzing risk across portfolios and geographies, while the impact assessment community works bottom up, grounded in local context and evidence. Future-ready nature reporting depends on connecting these two worlds.
This closing presentation explores the human and technological obstacles along that journey and how digital tools can help but also how they in themselves will never be a enough.
Kolbeinn Hilmarsson, CEO of Svarmi, combines aviation, technology, and sustainability experience to advance digital, bottom-up nature intelligence.