SPES Policy Brief n.3 - Seeing Sustainability Differently: New Metrics and Ethical Data Governance for a Just Transition

Key messages: Innovative data sources are reshaping how we measure sustainability transitions. New data types, ranging from web data to satellite imagery to remote sensing, from behavioral and biometric indicators to outputs from AI systems, may offer powerful tools for understanding transition dynamics. Novel data can enhance traditional sources if appropriately integrated. While not replacing traditional data sources and conventional methods, other sources can enrich sustainability insights. But this requires common quality standards and methodological rigor, as well as open access to data and scrutability of algorithmic tools and methods. Without ethical oversight, the use of emerging types of data risks undermining public trust. Novel data raise concerns about quality, validity, privacy, bias, representativity, and legitimacy. Addressing these challenges requires an ethical data governance framework closely linked to methodological integrity. Indeed, ensuring sound research demands both transparency in algorithmic tools and open access to data. Ethical and methodological considerations are thus deeply intertwined. Data governance must move beyond compliance to embed values of transparency, participation, inclusion, and accountability. EU institutions and national governments should adopt governance frameworks that ensure AI and data systems are interpretable, auditable, nonbiased, and co-designed with stakeholders. They should promote data production by means of citizen science, understood as the active involvement of people in generating, analyzing, and interpreting data for public interest purposes. Public attention is a critical – yet often overlooked – dimension of transition performance. The analysis of Google Trends reveals evolving public associations with sustainability, underscoring the need to align indicators not just with expert frameworks, but with people’s perceptions and concerns. Citizen science approaches and citizen-generated data have a role to play in sustainability governance. They enable more inclusive knowledge production, bridging the gap between institutional expertise and local experience. By involving people directly, these approaches can enhance transparency, legitimacy, responsiveness, and the evidence base of environmental decision-making for a just transition. Ethical data infrastructures and equitable data governance frameworks are not just technical issues – they are strategic enablers of a just and inclusive sustainability transition. Building legitimacy and effectiveness into just transition monitoring systems is essential to meeting the goals of the European Green Deal, the European Pillar of Social Rights, and the 2030 Agenda.