In today's interconnected world, the power of big data has the potential to positively shape international relations and foster collaboration between nations. As we face shared challenges such as climate change, health crises, and migration issues, data can play a crucial role in informing diplomatic efforts and foreign policy decisions.
Data sharing can be a powerful tool for collaboration between nations. By pooling resources, and sharing data on common challenges such as climate change or health crises, countries can not only gain better insight into issues, but can leverage the data for commonly agreed metrics of progress. Shared knowledge can lead to more effective policy-making, coordinated responses, and the development of innovative solutions. Data-driven collaboration can transcend borders and foster a sense of global unity in addressing pressing global issues. By sharing climate data, nations can work together to develop sustainable policies, set targets, and monitor progress.
Climate change is a global challenge that requires collective action and obviously a focus in the UAE as hosts to COP28 in November this year. Big data analytics can provide valuable insights into climate patterns, greenhouse gas emissions, and the impact of human activities on the environment. The United Nations finalised its framework for climate change statistics in March 2022, with the aim of helping countries compile their own climate change data in order to strengthen their ability to monitor climate change impact, adaptation and mitigation actions and share those statistics. Another resource is Microsoft’s Planetary Computer, a resource that combines a multi-petabyte catalogue of global environmental data with APIs and other tools to enable scientists explore the data for their work.
In the face of health crises, such as pandemics or the spread of infectious diseases, data-driven diplomacy can be a game changer, as seen during Covid, when government health organisations, researchers and healthcare providers collaborated on many different data programs. Cloud computing enabled researchers to share large sets of data and work collaboratively on them in unprecedented ways These programs, from both public and private sector included everything from studying the genome of the virus, to monitoring the spread of new variants, to collecting data on possible side effects of vaccines.