Conservation Data Justice

Conservation data justice examines the data justice challenges that arise in conservation data and decision-making. Data justice concerns the ways in which inequities can arise in the construction of large data, the (mis)representations that they can entail and the consequences of these problems. It is also concerned with challenges of data sovereignty. In conservation decision-making data justice concerns can be found in geospatial data which contain systematic biases in the way they represent people, economic activity, habitats or biodiversity. They can be found in models in which assumptions of particular sorts of human interactions with nature (such as the prevalence of degradation) or rationales for behaviour (such as profit maximisation) make it harder to recognise, and include, alternative forms of interaction or decision-making. In this introduction to the field, we examine how conservation data justice issues arise in conservation prioritisation, agroeconomic models, maps of human population and agricultural activity.