Digital twin politics: Unlocking the full potential of digital twins for sustainable ocean futures

Environmental challenges demand not only technological innovation but also critical interdisciplinary approaches that bridge the gap between science, society, and policy. The concept of Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTOs) exemplifies this intersection and offers a promising approach to monitoring progress in achieving environmental targets including in the areas of marine biodiversity, deep-seabed mining, fishing, shipping and plastic pollution.  

Despite a rapidly expanding range of potential DTO applications, research into their social and political dimensions remains underdeveloped. This gap is particularly concerning, as we argue that DTOs are inherently contested, ambiguous and political: Firstly, DTOs can risk exacerbating global inequalities, given the unequal capacities to develop, access, and utilize ocean data, information, and DTO models and technologies. Secondly, they introduce a range of legal and political challenges, including uncertainties around data access, ownership, security, and sharing. Thirdly, to ensure ethical use of DTOs, they require a robust framework of norms, rules, and values. All these aspects, we argue, remain neglected amid the current “twin rush.” 

To address these aspects and the overall lack of empirical social science research on the development and use of digital twins, the ERC project TwinPolitics (grant agreement No 101124903 – TwinPolitics – ERC-2024-STG) at the University of Vienna re-conceptualizes DTOs as a socio-technical relation shaped by specific institutional, political, and economic conditions within a hybrid environment of research, data, and observation. TwinPolitics seeks to unpack the emergence of so-called “digital twin politics” in international environmental governance by tackling key questions: How and why are DTOs developed by governments and utilized in marine scientific research? How are they designed to inform decision-making? To what extent are they, or could they be, integrated into multilateral governance? 

By exploring how social science perspectives can deepen our understanding of DTOs, this presentation is particularly fitting for this session as it highlights the essential interplay between environmental and social sciences in addressing global sustainability challenges.