Restarting the Economy in Support of Environment, through Technology

Time is running out to achieve a more sustainable development. Post COVID-19 economic stimuli need to deploy a green new deal (GND) that ReSETs economic systems to create secure and meaningful employment whilst protecting nature for people, for climate change and flood mitigation, temperature regulation, pollution prevention and soil and biodiversity conservation. This green new deal needs to harness safe, renewable technologies and nature-based solutions. A business as usual (BAU) post-COVID stimulus would embed employment, economic and environmental precarity in what is now fundamentally an unsustainable and unequitable model.RESET aims to leverage developments in spatial modelling, artificial intelligence and interoperable environmental sensing to better understand pathways to RESET agricultural and urban development across Europe for sustainability. For agriculture we will examine BAU versus an alternative trajectory of regenerative agriculture and rewilding. For cities we will examine BAU vs a more telecommuting focused trajectory of lowered densities, re-greening, traffic reduction to reduce (air, water, noise) pollution and improve the quality of urban life. In all cases we will examine impacts on employment, environment and economy.We focus on farmland and urban land uses as understudied environments and as key for sustainable development. We will build upon the success of our previous work in developing spatial policy support systems and accompanying user-led design processes, to further develop and integrate advanced environmental sensor networks with a focus on per-person individualised employment, economic and environmental outcomes of investments. This will require environmental and social intelligence to an unprecedented degree bringing together environmental modelling, advanced sensor research, social science and stakeholders’ engagement, and artificial intelligence to go way beyond conventional environmental impact assessment approaches.