Inventory of digital tools and their potential socio-economic impacts

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One of the purposes of DESIRA is to analyse the potential of digital technologies to improve conditions in 20 European regions, by establishing 'Living Labs', or networks of stakeholders selected to represent a variety of agricultural, rural and forestry areas in these regions. These Living Labs analyse their existing Social-Cyber-Physical-System (SCPS) by means of a ‘focal question’ that aims to explain why and how the process of digital transformation of these SCPS may have socio-economic impacts. A focal question for instance can be ‘how to reduce the risk of forest fires?’.

Living Labs

Living labs are groups of people. They are selected on the basis of a motivation to work on a specific problem, called ‘focal question’, the object of the analysis. After this, people who are involved in this problem are contacted: farmers or farmers advisors, technicians and technology developers. The methodology is: interviews, workshops, gathering of further data for validation on the context. A SWOT analysis is conducted on the specific problem, and potential future scenarios (one realistic and one pessimistic) are developed for conducting scenario workshops.

Social-Cyber-Physical-System

A Socio-Cyber-Physical System can be understood as follows:

A system is a set of entities with relations and interactions between them. These interactions can create new entities. The entities and the boundaries of a system are defined by the observer in relation to his/her purposes. Hence a description of a system is a representation of reality according to a specific observer.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are next-generation engineered systems that integrate embedded computing technology (cyber part) into the physical phenomena by using transformative research approaches that account for the complexity and multi-disciplinarity of such systems.
A socio-technical system consists of social entities and technical entities that interact with each other and have equal importance in the understanding of socio-technical systems. Social actors all have various needs, wants, skills, knowledge. Technical entities are non-human entities, including technologies as well as processes surrounding those technologies.
A SCPS consist of three domains (socio, cyber and physical) all of equal importance and with the ability to influence other domains. Each domain has a broad range of different entities governed by a set of rules, but also between domains hybrid rules determine the relations and interactions of the entities within the domains.

To support the Living Labs, a toolkit has been developed, composed of several parts.

First, an inventory of digital tools, namely Gnomee (Knowledge Base of Potential Digital Game Changers in Rural Areas) was developed The objective of the inventory was to collect a number of digital tools: software applications, adverse sensors, etc. Whatever can be used for agriculture, forestry, rural areas, in order to get an overview, a picture of the digital tools available and that can be used. The development of the GNOMEE interface was based on an online survey on digital tools which provided 700 responses, each of which describes a digital tool with a specific function (i.e. it operates in a specific way to fulfil a given task).
Second, an online survey on the current impacts of digital tools and their expectation about the next year was carried out.
Third, each digital tool can be useful in one or more application scenarios in the domains of agriculture, forestry and rural areas.

Application scenarios

In DESIRA, application scenarios have been built by grouping digital tools according to the function they serve. For instance, the scenario livestock in agriculture groups all digital tools that can be used to support animal husbandry activities, which differ from those that can be used for machinery for instance. A non-exhaustive but well developed list of the application scenarios derived from an online survey is offered. Three domains are covered: agriculture (e.g. food, crops, livestock, management), forestry (e.g. wood, wildfires, CO2, machinery, timber) and rural areas (e.g. mobility, healthcare, demography, education, government, infrastructure). An example of digital tool pertaining to the agricultural domain is a ‘software for irrigation management needs mapping and automatic fertilisation according to requirements (precision techniques)’ used for crop fertilisation. An example from the forestry domain is a ‘systems to support operations preventing wildfires’ used for prevention purposes or ‘estimation of the amount of carbon absorbed by the plant’ used for CO2. An example from the rural areas domain is a ‘platform for buying houses and starting businesses in depopulated rural areas’ used for demography purposes.

Digital technologies (or digital paradigms) with the potential of being digital game changers are web-based tools, data analytics, a local data collection tool, a remote data collection tool, cloud/edge computing, robotics or other autonomous solutions, artificial intelligence-based techniques, and social networks. These digital technologies are potential digital game changers (DGC) in a given context.

Digital game changers

DGCs in DESIRA are defined as ‘digital technologies that deeply reconfigure routines, rules, actors, and artefacts of social and economic life’. They have the potential to change the rules of a game, and identifying the latter (in DESIRA, the socio-cyber-physical system) helps to understand the positive and negative disruption they may cause. Practically speaking, some key characteristics of a digital game changer can be identified: it is based on the use of digital technologies and has the potential to become widespread because of low cost or because it comes for free. Software-only solutions typically spread faster than those also involving hardware because the digital world operates at faster speeds than the physical one: that is why Facebook or Twitter took very little to enter our lives, or why solutions for online working are becoming increasingly popular. Four fundamental questions need answering: is the new technology meeting a need (in a specific field)? Is it easy to use? Is it affordable? Is the right set of technologies in place? Has the technology the potential to highly impact current processes? Answering yes to all those questions is a good hint to identify potential digital game changers. Identified potential game changers in the context of DESIRA are: social media, cloud, local and remote sensing, distributed ledgers, data and analytics, augmented reality, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, connectivity.

This Inventory also provides a map of plausible socio-economic impacts associated with the selected potential DGCs.

Socio-economic impacts

In the context of the DESIRA project, socio-economic impact is defined as: the opportunities and threats of digitisation which has ‘deep repercussions on people’s lives, and generates losers (who are marginalised by the changes) and opponents (who resists and create alternative rules of the game) as well as winners (who benefit from the change)’.

The map of impacts is composed of three layers: domain, area of impact, outcome and each outcome is then linked to potential digital game changers.

Domain of impact

Refers to the macro-dimensions involved in the digitalisation process as emerging from the literature review: economic, environment, governance, social. In the literature, the governance domain is considered part of the social domain. Instead in the proposed DESIRA mapping, it represents a domain to emphasise its policy and administrative macro-dimensions.

Area of impact

Sub-dimensions or specific areas within each domain emerging from the literature review. Although not exhaustive, it identifies several areas of interest to provide a detailed impact map (e.g. areas of impact for the environment domain include: animal wellbeing, ecosystem services, natural resources and risk management).

Outcome

For each area of impact, the main outcomes of digital technologies have been identified and selected. For example, in the economic domain, digitalisation has an impact on companies (organisations) determining a higher decision-making autonomy in the production process as an outcome. In the environmental domain, the area of impact related to ecosystem services has the capability of reducing pollution emissions, thus having an impact on climate.

Literature review, an online survey and several experts’ interviews have been performed to enrich and support the Inventory.

The Gnomee interface

Definitions (digital game changer, socio-cyber-physical system, socio-economic impacts)

The Inventory

Examples of digital tools, application scenarios and socio-economic impacts

Relevance for monitoring and evaluation of the CAP

Potential provision of monitoring data. The Inventory has been developed to help the work of the Living Labs and has contributed to identifying at least 50 practice abstracts, each of which describes a digital tool or project, its application scenario and potential socio-economic impacts. The operation of these digital tools has created data that may be suitable for monitoring purposes. For instance, environmental quality monitoring, air quality monitoring, tree monitoring technologies for forest resources to support climate adaptation and mitigation, using satellite data for monitoring CAP compliance, crop satellite monitoring, a satellite monitoring system that generates a ‘green index’, a monitoring tool providing meteo-climatic data, monitoring of forest health and detection of forest threats. Authorities charged with monitoring should examine the appropriateness of this data and if found adequate, seek ways to integrate them into their monitoring framework.

Potential to evaluate innovation. For evaluators, it is interesting to understand the criteria that are used to select the tools. Before developing the survey and the technical questionnaire to identify the tools, a study reaching more than 1000 people was conducted. This is interesting for evaluators because it also shows the broad scope of innovations which could be possible to happen in rural areas and in agriculture thanks to such digital tools and game changers. It can therefore be used to evaluate innovation.

Data collection from the farmer. The digital tools included in the Inventory provide data from farmers and for farmers. In many cases, the tool is used to collect data from the farmer thanks to sensors, smartphones or computers. Then raw data are sent to a distant server which will treat them, make calculations, cartographies and recommendations. Those results are sent back to farmers’ terminals to help them make decisions (e.g. on irrigation, fertilisation, crops). Therefore, these digital tools can be examined on a case-by-case basis as concerns their ability to supply evaluation data. Their value added is that they contain data that is open, accessible and available by the users thanks to solutions offered by digital technologies.

In addition, the Inventory can be useful for understanding the effects of measures related to the digitalisation of agriculture, forestry and rural areas, pertinent for the horizontal objective of the CAP.

Last modification date:

10/12/2021

Project details

DESIRA:
Digitisation: Economic and Social Impact in Rural Areas

Objectives

DESIRA aims to improve the capacity of society and political bodies to respond to the challenges that digitalisation generates in agriculture, forestry and rural areas.

Specific objectives:

Fill the socio-economic knowledge gaps on digitalisation in agriculture, forestry and rural areas.
Assess the past and current socio-economic impact of digitalisation in relation to Sustainable Development Goals.
Improve the capacity of communities to reflect on future risks and opportunities of digitalisation.
Improve the capacity of rural communities to reap the opportunities offered by digitisation and to improve resilience related to associated risks.
Promote online and offline interaction and learning among a wide range of stakeholders.
Increase the uptake of societal concerns in ICT-related policy and innovation, and to align digitalisation scenarios with societal needs and expectations.

Timeframe:

2019 to 2023

Contacts of project holder:

Gianluca Brunori, University of Pisa (IT)

Project website(s):

DESIRA

CORDIS database

Territorial coverage:

Austria, Belgio, Croazia, Finlandia, Francia, Germania, Grecia, Ungheria, Irlanda, Italia, Lettonia, Polonia, Spagna, Paesi Bassi

Relevant CAP Objectives:

4. Climate change action
5. Environmental care
6. Preserve landscape and biodiversity
H. Knowledge and innovation

Data Collection Systems Used:

Ad-hoc data collection

Associated Evaluation Approaches:

Desk research
Impact evaluation ongoing
Scenario analysis

Type of Output:

Methodology
New / improved data for M&E
Visualisation tools

Spatial Scale:

Regional
National

Keywords:

digital technologies
digitalisation
Socio-economic impacts