The Argo program is an international scientific network that coordinates an array of autonomous floats that roam (primarily) the upper 2000 meters of the ice-free ocean, collecting data on currents, temperature and salinity. The floats use satellites to communicate near-real time data to designated receiving centers, where the raw data are made available for immediate purposes before being processed and eventually published as high-quality data for scientific research. This study examines the emergence of the Argo program in relation to a perceived urgent need for climate-relevant ocean data in the late 1990s and considers implications of the interactions between the Argo program and climate change in subsequent decades. We outline how the physical floats, the data they record, and the aims and strategies formulated around the program have acted as ‘environing’ technologies and media that have brought the ocean into close interaction with climate science and climate change governance since around 2010. We suggest that as part of this co-environing process, the Argo program has helped produce novel views of the ocean's historicity, where feedbacks between technical mediation and environmental epistemology ties ocean variability to human temporalities. We show that this new historicity extends not only to the human past but also into ocean futures through association with the ‘cultures of prediction’ dominant in climate science and models. To conclude, we briefly place our argument in the context of contemporary aims for growing the so-called blue economy, promising a human-ocean relationship increasingly centered on notions of control, active management, economic development and climate change mitigation.

The EU’s Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) is presented as a coherent, high-resolution, multi-dimensional, multi-variable and near real-time representation of the ocean that integrates new data sources with advanced modeling, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. The two-way exchange of information between marine ecosystems and the digital twin is intended to create a feedback loop between the digital and physical realms that is emblematic of environing media. The EU’s vision is that the DTO will empower citizens, inform politicians, support a blue economy, and improve protection of the marine environment. The sociotechnical imaginary of the DTO presents a narrative that a balance between sustainable exploitation and conservation can be had through the use of sophisticated digital technology. But what is at stake in this technocratic control over the world ocean, and where does it come from? Whose interest will digital twins ultimately serve? Understood in its historical and environmental context, the DTO caters to the aims of sustainable development, but risks veiling continued unsustainable development and growth under the guise of new digital technologies. We use the theoretical lens of environing media and sociotechnical imaginaries to critically unpack this narrative and its historical contingencies, and show how difficult goal conflicts are systematically glossed over through a veil of datafication and technological development.

Loss and Damage benefits from the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence systems to support prevention and assessment. As AI research and development is highly dominated by western and private-led powers, the effectiveness of its use is limited for vulnerable countries. We call for an accessible, inclusive and locally-grounded AI to serve the needs of the most vulnerable, support Article 8 of the Paris Agreement and democratise innovation.

Over the past half century, the global environment has become subject to an accelerated pace of mediation and datafication. This ongoing transition has become so comprehensive that the knowledge, management and governance of the Earth system is dependent on enormous flows of data from a “vast machine” of measuring tools. These processes combined have formed what we call a “mediated planet,” subject to interpretation and shared human decision-making – that should ideally be democratic, inclusive and accountable. As environmental datafication continues to accelerate, private corporations are gaining increasing influence on and power over the associated collections of data. This is a cause for concern, as the global environmental commons are a public interest of concern to all people. This article argues for the need to critically research the challenges and risks associated with the rapid datafication of the environment, specifically in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for climate change (13), the ocean (14), biodiversity (15) and inclusive and accountable institutions (16). More knowledge is needed of how the SDGs and their supporting networks influence data-generation on a mediated planet, and how issues of access to and use of environmental data, as well as data ownership and AI implementation, can best be navigated. We contend that such knowledge can help enhance the democratic potential of the SDGs to build public trust and secure broad participation in global environmental governance in ways that also support peaceful and inclusive societies, as promised by SDG 16.

This essay engages with recent scholarship on the epistemology of AI, data and automation, to assert how these practices are becoming increasingly central both to the projects of monitoring and of managing a global environment. We also review Jürgen Renn’s recent contribution The Evolution of Knowledge (2020) in relation to the history of environmental data. Using Renn as point of departure, we stake out a way for understanding the Anthropocene through the interaction between data and environment, taking into account the deeper political implications of datafication. We conclude with discussions about how historians of technology and environment could play an important role in assessing the opportunities and risks of AI for global environmental justice before their full-scale implementation is a fait accompli. In face of the Anthropocene, there is a general need today for integrative efforts of bridging knowledge from natural, technical, social and humanistic domains, and therefore a strong imperative for humanistic studies to transposetools, methodologies, and insights into the realms of policymaking, and legislation. Thus, assessments of AI and environment must account for these historical processes in the present as well as offer critical analysis of the full ontological spectrum from object to epistemology via data and mediation.