Year: 2026 | Month: May | Volume: 13 | Issue: 5 | Pages: 39-53
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20260504
Environmental Ethics in Social Media-Based Sustainability Research: From Cultural Ecosystem Services to Digital Environmental Governance: A Literature Review
Romi Djafar1, Abdul Haris Panai2, Sukirman Rahim3, Marini Susanti Hamidun4
1Doctoral Program in Environmental Science, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, Gorontalo, Indonesia
2,3,4Postgraduate Program, Universitas Negeri Gorontalo, Gorontalo, Indonesia
Corresponding Author: Romi Djafar
ABSTRACT
Social media data have become a major empirical resource for examining how people perceive, value, discuss, contest, and govern environmental change. This literature review synthesizes recent scholarship on cultural ecosystem services, environmental communication, biodiversity monitoring, built-environment studies, and sustainability governance. It argues that environmental ethics should become the organizing framework of social media-based environmental research. Recent studies show rapid methodological expansion through natural language processing, computer vision, multimodal fusion, geospatial analytics, transformer models, reinforcement learning, and generative AI, enabling increasingly fine-grained analyses of human-environment relations (Schirpke et al., 2023; Yang et al., 2025; Ghermandi et al., 2026). At the same time, these advances amplify ethical concerns around representation, demographic bias, privacy, consent, interpretability, intervention, platform instability, and unequal access to environmental benefits and participation (Oguro & Shibata, 2025; Otero et al., 2025; Chandana et al., 2025; Fox et al., 2025). Across domains, the literature consistently shows that digital traces are not neutral mirrors of environmental reality; rather, they are selective, culturally mediated, and normatively charged signals that can either reproduce or challenge existing inequities. This review therefore proposes an environmental-ethics agenda centered on epistemic justice, relational valuation, responsible automation, and governance-ready transparency. It concludes that the future of this field depends less on harvesting more data than on designing ethically reflexive, multimethod, and publicly accountable research infrastructures capable of supporting just and ecologically meaningful decision-making.
Keywords: Environmental ethics; social media analytics; cultural ecosystem services; environmental communication; sustainability governance; digital environmental justice; AI for sustainability
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