The Challenges of Qualitative Data Synthesis for Socio-Environmental Assessments

Available data regarding environmental sciences represents an extremely complex set of inputs since that field of science became one of the most dynamic areas of scientific research. Data science has a huge impact on environmental analysis, offering an abundant scope of new techniques that are used to understand even the most seldom environmental processes. There is no doubt that it is a multidisciplinary challenge because it deals with many fields such as statistics, artificial intelligence, social sciences, psychology, economics, health, etc. Environmental studies forced societies to try to answer questions regarding processes of climate change, human pressures, negative impacts on land, water, and air quality, energy efficiency, health, and food safety, biodiversity and many other aspects. In order to answer those questions, the results of qualitative data analysis must be taken into account when assessing the situation and defining measures for the improvement of particular ecosystems. The aim of this paper is to emphasize a necessity for qualitative data collecting and analyzing through presentation of some assessment examples aimed to define importance of social dimensions in environmental sustainability.