WorldEDIT

Earth Degradation Intervention Tool

THE ASU ADVANTAGE

How has the earth’s land cover changed overtime?

What strategies can country leaders implementto revitalize degraded land?

What are the economic tradeoffs to interventions?

A Changing Landscape

Land degradation is a global challenge. Loss of productive land contributes to climate change, environmental hazards, food scarcity, economic and social turmoil, and the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Without intervention, degraded land will continue to impact increasing numbers of humans, endangered species and the climate, and will present new challenges to stable governance.

Degradation’s widespread nature and regional intricacies present a challenge to implement restoration strategies tailored to the unique characteristics of an area.

The Decision Theater’s WorldEDIT informs leaders of existing land degradation trends and provides mechanisms to virtually experiment with proposed interventions. The tool assists in the development of mitigation strategies providing the greatest impact to people, species, and the climate while balancing economic investment and return.

Multiple Perspectives in a Single Setting

World EDIT delivers dynamic insights into a region’s current and historic land degradation, agricultural production, economic standing and endangered species. The model prompts users to explore regionally suitable restoration interventions and calculates their projected impacts on future land coverage and economic outcomes.

New Findings Build Better Questions

WorldEDIT reveals insights on multifaceted impacts of land degradation in a new, easy to use and highly interactive, visualized format. The software platform provides users the freedom to ask their own questions while using multiple streams of data sources and high performance computing to receive immediate responses. As participants engage, design a scenario, and digest outcomes, they gain new understanding of system complexities. Equipped with more knowledge, users ask new questions and receive tailored insights into possible futures. WorldEdit provides visualized data driven analysis to make and compare alternative intervention business cases leading to more informed discussions and decision making.

Behind the Tool

WorldEDIT integrates data from Conservation International™, Trends. Earth, Redlist API and World Bank to deliver information on land coverage, endangered species and economic impacts of restoration efforts.

Co-Creation for Effective Deliberation

WorldEDIT is the product of close cooperation between ASU’s Decision Theater and Conservation International™ (CI) to inform decision and policy makers and stakeholders regarding soil degradation. Complex, interrelated problems such as land degradation require strategic, multidisciplinary framing. Development was informed by CI’s domain expertise and technically structured by Decision Theater’s software engineering team.