What even is data, and why should you care?
Written by Nhiyc
Editor: Lucija Ajvazoski
We talk about data constantly. Data-driven decisions. Data-backed policies. Data, data, DATA! It's everywhere, and somehow it's still not doing what it's supposed to do.
We have decades of climate data. We know the planet is warming, and it's in crisis. We know which industries, which players are responsible. We know what needs to change. And yet, the most common political response to any climate proposal is still: we need more research, we need more data.
So what's actually going on?
Data is not the same as truth
Nobody tells you in school or even at work that data needs context, interpretation, and, of course, framing. And whoever controls that framing controls the story.
Take climate data. The same dataset can be used to demonstrate a five-alarm crisis or to cast doubt on whether a crisis exists at all. It depends entirely on who's talking, who they're talking to, and what they want you to believe. Fossil fuel companies figured this out early. A peer-reviewed analysis published in Science found that ExxonMobil's own internal climate models accurately predicted global warming between 63 and 83% of the time, even as the company's public communications consistently emphasised uncertainty and doubt. They didn't need to disprove climate science. They just needed people to feel like the jury was still out.
That's not a data problem. That's a power problem.
The same logic applies to the data we generate every day. Social media engagement metrics don't show you what people actually care about. They show you what a monetisation algorithm decided to amplify. Economic data built around GDP growth makes entire countries look successful while ignoring the fact that rivers are drying up and people can't afford to eat. Look at India. One of the fastest growing major economies in the world, yet it comes with severe environmental costs. Air pollution causes approximately 2.1 million deaths annually, according to the State of Global Air 2025 report, and around 70% of surface water is contaminated, according to NITI Aayog's Composite Water Management Index (2018).
What's the point of economic "growth" if people are too sick to benefit from it? What gets measured, and what gets left out, is a political choice disguised as a technical one.
When everything is data, the person doing the categorising has enormous power
We are living through what researchers call datafication: the process of turning more and more of human experience into quantifiable, storable, tradeable information. Your location, your health, your relationships, your political views, your grief, your joy. All of it is now potentially a data point.
On the surface, this sounds neutral, maybe even useful. More information should mean better decisions, right?
But datafication doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens within systems that already have winners and losers. And when you decide what to measure, you decide what matters. GDP measures economic output but not wellbeing. Carbon accounting measures emissions from energy use but often obscures the emissions embedded in global supply chains. Biodiversity loss is notoriously difficult to quantify, which is part of why it keeps getting deprioritised in climate negotiations despite being, you know, catastrophic.
The communities most affected by climate breakdown are often the least represented in the data used to make decisions about them. Pacific Island nations, like Tuvalu, whose land is literally disappearing, have been generating climate vulnerability data for decades. That data has built academic careers, funded NGOs, and informed international reports. While the world studies them, talks about them, writes about them, the ocean is swallowing their homes. Knowledge without action is beyond useless. It's cruel.
So who actually controls data?
Increasingly, it's not governments. It's not scientists. It's a small number of very large technology companies.
According to Synergy Research Group, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together control around 63% of global cloud infrastructure spending. That includes vast amounts of government and scientific data. The infrastructure that stores and transmits global climate information is largely owned by private corporations operating beyond the jurisdiction of any single state. When the US administration shuts down climate agencies or deletes datasets, that data doesn't just vanish into thin air. But it does become inaccessible, buried in bureaucratic limbo or quietly removed from public view. The infrastructure that was supposed to make information free has made it deeply vulnerable to whoever sits at the top.
This isn't a glitch. It's the design.
We built a digital economy on a model where the product is you. Your attention, your behaviour, your data, packaged and sold. The same extractive logic that drove colonial resource theft from the Global South now drives data extraction from the same regions. Research from the World Resources Institute found that forests managed by Indigenous communities in the Amazon remove 340 million tonnes of CO2 each year, equivalent to the UK's annual fossil fuel emissions, while forests outside Indigenous management have become net carbon sources. Meanwhile, carbon markets have historically directed funding toward areas of active deforestation rather than rewarding the communities protecting intact forest, meaning the people doing the most to preserve the Amazon's remaining carbon capacity receive the least financial recognition for it. African farmers, similarly, are increasingly being asked to generate data for precision agriculture platforms they often cannot afford to access, with the value flowing to the platforms rather than the communities producing it. Pacific climate data funds research institutions in the Global North while the islands themselves face existential threat.
The geography of who extracts and who gets extracted from has not changed. It's just gone digital.
Why this matters for climate action specifically
If the problem isn't lack of data but lack of power to act on it, then asking for more data is at best a distraction and at worst a deliberate stalling tactic.
We already know deforestation is accelerating. We already know fossil fuels need to stay in the ground. We already know which communities are bearing the worst impacts of a crisis they did least to cause. The question was never really "do we have enough information?" The question is: who benefits from pretending we don't?
Climate justice and data justice are the same fight. Who owns the data about your community determines who gets to tell the story of what's happening to it. Who controls the infrastructure determines whether that story gets heard or buried. Who decides what counts as evidence determines which harms get taken seriously in court, in policy, in the room where decisions get made.
This is why, with Panic with a Purpose, CJ and I keep coming back to data not as a technical topic but as a question of power. Not "how do we collect more?" but "who controls what we already have, and who benefits?"
That's the question this series of articles is built around. And we're just getting started.
This article is part of a series expanding on the conversations from Panic with a Purpose, a podcast exploring data, AI, and justice for people and the planet. Episode 1 on Data Sovereignty, Democracy, and Ownership is out now.
