HIDDEN SAND: Holistic Investigation of the Distribution, Extraction, and Networks associated with SAND

The contemporary world is built on sand. A crucial component of the vital goods we rely on, from cement for construction to the glass and silicon chips which allow you to read this sentence, the world's insatiable thirst for sand - it is now the second most consumed natural resource after water - fuels a ~$2.25B global industry. Moreover, global demand for sand is expected to double in the next few decades. While it is an essential commodity, sand's high value and relative ease of extraction has in many locations, particularly sensitive river systems, fuelled rampant exploitation, criminal activity and a lack of oversight and control. Over exploitation of river sand has seen resources dwindle in rapidly growing areas, resulting in a global market wherein developing nations extract sand for richer ones at growing social-environmental costs. The complexity of sand as a commodity means there is a major research gap around the social-environmental impacts of the global sand trade. Despite its strategic importance, end-to-end oversight of the sand commodity chain is lacking. Sand is visible at key points along the chain: during extraction, in storage and in use, but much of the journey and the environmental, social, and economic impacts in between are invisible. A key issue is that sand extraction and use cross-cuts across disciplines as it moves along this chain. The absence of an interdisciplinary approach to sand means that a whole-system understanding of the costs, benefits and trade-offs involved has therefore, until now, been lacking. HIDDEN SAND brings together river sciences, engineering, human geography, geohumanities, practice-based art, and digital methodologies to develop a new way of undertaking interdisciplinary research within a novel Digital Twin environment. A Digital Twin is a virtual replica of the physical world that can move between scales and enable monitoring, simulation, and analysis. Critically, our Digital Twin provides a means to visualise the previously hidden networks, commodity chains and impacts that characterise sand extraction. By connecting the diverse methods used to interpret currently unseen sand identities, our Digital Twin will capture all the relevant physical, social, economic, cultural and emotional components of the system. Moreover, it will be developed in a participatory manner, in part being constructed by community members sharing their insights about sand extraction and trading and the impacts on their lives and surroundings. As such HIDDEN SAND's Digital Twin will afford a means to revolutionise the study of sand extraction by placing transdisciplinary collaboration at its heart, while simultaneously offering a means to amplify local voices within an inclusive digital environment framework. Our project focuses on the Cambodian Mekong, at once one of the world's most ecologically important, yet intensively sand-mined rivers in the world. The impacts of sand mining on physical and ecological river functioning there are still not fully understood and neither have the impacts of sand extraction on local communities, potential labour rights abuses and displacement of local populations been addressed. Economically sand is undervalued, although by how much, when tensioned off against the physical and socioecological damage it causes, is unknown. The participatory nature of our Digital Twin framework means that HIDDEN SAND will address these urgent questions by lending voice to community members who have experienced how their environment, livelihoods, cultural practices, and overall well-being have been impacted by the sand trade.