Local Costs Of Remote Sensing

Examining the Ethics of Laser Scanning in Tropical Forests

To the Point:

• Laser scanning, ethics: New research shows that high-resolution remote sensing in tropical forests can reinforce inequalities in access, knowledge, and control, requiring ethical reflection in its use.
• Balanced view: Remote sensing is not inherently harmful and can support local communities, but ethical dimensions must guide its application.
• Framework for action: The study proposes guidelines to help researchers decide when mapping is inappropriate to better serve those most affected by ecological crises.

Laser scanning, often referred to as Lidar, has rapidly transformed how tropical forest regions are studied, monitored, and understood across academic disciplines. The technology enables researchers to peer through dense forest canopy, rapidly providing high resolution scans of the landscape below. This growing observational power is central to the scientific value of remote sensing technologies, but also brings into focus the conditions, interests, and power structures under which they are used.

Now in a new paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution, an international team of researchers argues that the visibility brought by high-resolution remote sensing may result in the loss of what have long been cultural refuges against dominant powers, and that ethical considerations should be integral to research planning when using such data.

“Remote sensing research has often been framed as a technical exercise to support more efficient management and observation,” says Patrick Roberts, director of the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (MPI GEA), and corresponding author of the study. “Yet, mapping is never only a technical practice, and decisions about what is revealed, how, where are inherently ethical and political.”

The new paper acknowledges the value of remote sensing but argues that while discipline-specific ethical discussions around the technology have occurred, they have tended to focus on technicalities of research and data presentation rather than whether and under what conditions to map. The authors organize these considerations into three broad areas:

1. Knowledge, access, and control – who decides when to map, why, and who controls the data?
2. Population rights, exposure and dispossession – how might this data be used to ‘expose’ communities, marginalized groups in society, or resources for extraction?
3. The material costs of seeing – how might the process of remote sensing, in turn, contribute to the climatic and environmental impacts it is seeking to prevent?

“These issues challenge us to think about the oft-promoted but simplistic idea of mapping ‘for the greater good,'” says Gabriel Hes of the University of Toulouse, lead author of the current paper. “Whose ‘greater good’ are we talking about and are forest mapping technologies reinforcing imbalances in knowledge production, political power and environmental impacts? In this paper, we urge our colleagues to reflect on the ethical costs of their methods, considering the potential intersectional impacts (on race, age, gender, wealth, class) of high-resolution mapping of tropical forests.”

“We are not arguing that remote sensing is inherently ‘bad’,” Roberts adds, “indeed it has been used by local communities to safeguard their territories and rights. Rather, we urge consideration by scientists of the varied ethical dimensions impacting their research whether they carry out mapping on local, regional or global scales.”

The authors conclude with a framework for helping researchers decide when mapping is inappropriate. In reframing environmental science as an asset for transformative change, they hope that these considerations will ensure that tropical forest mapping best serves the needs of those impacted most by the current global ecological crisis.