As we roll into the new year off the back of global commitments made at COP26 in Glasgow, and what we hope is a renewed momentum for rapid change to combat the climate crisis, we thought we would share our own experience of the state of accessible climate data in 2022.
Our founding mission at Delve is to accelerate the transition to net zero by giving our users the tools they need to make climate positive purchasing choices in their everyday lives. We are joining up the world’s climate data at company, industry, and national levels, and translating that data into simple personalised changes that you as an individual can take to reduce your impact.
Data sits at the heart of informed decision making at every level, so it would logically follow that having a standardised and accessible dataset for the world’s emissions data must be a prerequisite for designing effective strategies to combat the crisis. From our experiences building Delve, there still remain considerable gaps to be filled in before we achieve that starting point.
For datasets to be widely useful, we think they need to have 3 key attributes:
Standardisation
For a global challenge on the scale of climate change, there is a huge amount of work being done in parallel by different organisations around the world.
Methodologies, classification taxonomies, and national requirements for emissions reporting vary greatly between different countries and bloks, making it difficult to query data that crosses national boundaries.
Organisation
Data science and analytics tools rely on data being in a well structured format in order to be useful. Structured data and API based infrastructure have been at the heart of most cross-industry disruptions in the past 20 years, yet a huge amount of company and national emissions data remains buried deep in PDF documents, that are themselves hidden in poorly searchable statistics archives.
Accessibility
The result of this huge collective effort must be freely available if it is to be used by the largest possible audience. Locking away valuable data behind private paywalls leads to fragmentation of the sources that research groups and startups can base their solutions on, and stifles grassroots innovation that lack the funding to pay expensive licence fees.
Conclusions
There is a lot of work being done on the above points, but in general our assessment is that climate datasets in their current state are still too fragmented and poorly structured to be accessible to the huge range of organisations that need them to inform their own decision making.
We at Delve are working hard at aggregating and structuring data that can be translated to actions at an individual level. Our app securely connects with your bank accounts to easily track the emissions from your purchases, and generates simple actions and changes that you can make to reduce your impact.
We are also working on a publicly available API to make this data freely available to anyone who wants it. Through this collaborative approach we hope we can forge valuable partnerships, and make our work available to the widest possible audience.
Join Delve today and start reducing your impact
Delve is a climate tech startup accelerating the transition to net zero by empowering people to make climate positive choices in their everyday lives.
Our app securely connects to your bank accounts using Open Banking APIs to effortlessly track and reduce the emissions from your purchases and lifestyle.
