Appreciating the role of big data in the modernization of environmental governance

The development of the Internet of Things, drones, and new social media platforms opened up an unprecedented space for the autonomy of human society. It promoted the formation of a new form of social relations and social field— cyber society (Jones, 1995). The cyber society has already become a digital twin of the actual society and even the extensions. It reconstructed the whole society through impacting social control and social norms. In this context, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to expand the field of social governance from traditional society to cyber society. As a vital information carrier, data records all activities in reality and cyber society. At present, cheaper and more accessible data storage, analysis, sharing, and distribution tools brought an explosive and exponential growth of the global data volume. Both governments and business companies have realized the massive value of big data. They took their respective advantages to dig out information for business management and social governance decision-makings from massive and unstructured big data. With artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning, image identification, and natural language processing, we achieved significant advancements in data collection, processing, optimization, and prediction. These advancements allow us to observe the social operation mechanisms from big data that help the decision-makers improve the modernization level of social governance. In this context, the role of big data in social governance has become a hot topic in the current management research. As an essential field of social governance, modernizing the systems and capacities of environmental governance is an important dimension. Meanwhile, the field of environmental governance offers a broader space for applying big data and artificial intelligence due to its characteristics of multiple spatial-temporal scales, complex interaction effects between pollutants and polluting media, and high uncertainties involving stakeholders (Zhong et al., 2021). A systemic understanding of the role of big data and artificial intelligence in promoting the transformation of environmental governance is in line with national strategic needs and has cross-field demonstration significance. Up to now, most research on big data in environmental governance has been case studies, explaining the technical paths of particular application scenarios. They revealed the partial picture but failed to form systemic thinking. This paper puts forward a conceptual framework for the role of big data in environmental governance. The frontier application scenarios that deserve attention are summarized to elaborate the framework. It also highlights research frontiers of interest to scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Finally, from the viewpoint of system engineering, this paper specifies strategies that should be taken to cope with the challenges in China’s practices.