COP has just finished up in Sharm El Sheik and we had two of our teammates there representing OpenEarth. The Paris Agreement is a very powerful tool we have for global collaboration to progress on environmental goals. We are honored to be able to develop open source technology as a partner of UNFCCC. Here are some highlights from our time in Egypt.
We kicked off our events by launching the first version of the digital platform of the UNFCCC Global Innovation Hub, which we built alongside AWS, UNFCCC and presented a data taxonomy developed by our close collaborators Metabolic. The UN Global Innovation Hub (UGIH) is a three way marketplace for driving climate innovation within cities. We presented the design and build of the Virtual Hub at the UGIH Pavilion. Learn more about the UGIH here. Watch the recap here, and if you are a city official and want to participate in testing, reach out to innovationhub@unfccc.int
Next, we launched OpenClimate on November 10th also at the UNFCCC Global Innovation Hub Pavilion. What is the OpenClimate Network? In order for us to track collective progress toward the Paris Agreement, there are many datasets and actors that need to be accounted for. The OpenClimate Network is a stocktaking platform that nests the accounting information from various data sources for cities, states and provinces under the relevant country. Providing data in this format is key for decision makers to understand where we are at and where to prioritize mitigation efforts. Also, the platform is fully open source! This means it’s reliable and adaptable to the needs of the climate action data community. You can watch the video here, check out the platform here, and sign up for the webinar on Nov 22nd here.
Also on Nov 10th, Science Day, in partnership with the Data Driven EnviroLab, we celebrated the winners of our first Global Stocktake Climate Datathon in an event with the COP Presidency. The datathon was an open source initiative to build capacity around the Global Stocktake - measuring our collective progress toward the Paris Agreement. We had high level speakers: H.E. Hala Halemy el-Said (Egyptian Ministry of Planning and Economic Development), Farhan Akhtar (co-facilitator of the Global Stocktake), and Joshua Amponsem (climate activist and the founder of Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO)). Click here to read more about our winners. If you’d like to get involved in the next iteration reach out to us at climatedata@openearth.org.
Along with the theme of supporting the Global Stocktake process, with our partners Data Driven EnviroLab, we participated in the Global Stocktake poster session, where we presented our poster. The Global Stocktake for the Paris Agreement will take place next year, which will measure our collective progress towards the commitments made in the Paris Climate Agreement. We outlined the actions we’ve taken in order to facilitate our initiative to digitally enabling the independent global stocktake (DIGS). The response from parties at the Global Stocktake closing plenary was very positive about all the innovation the co-facilitators have brought into the mechanism development process. You can see our poster on the UNFCCC website here. You can read more about DIGS here.
On biodiversity day, Nov 16, in partnership with Nature4Climate, Arboretica and Metabolic, we launched the second iteration of the Nature-based Solutions Policy Tracker that examines the policy/commitment ambition landscape and makes key recommendations to policymakers for building capacity around developing legislation and policies. Our analysis also explores countries’ international commitments and some low hanging fruit for raising ambition of these international commitments–-particularly the NDCs (each country’s contribution to the Paris Agreement). In order to make different data sets, policy lists, and climate/nature action targets all speak to each other in a way that is relevant for decision making, we need to have some cohesion. You can check out the report here.
Also on biodiversity day, we held a panel at the UNFCCC Global Innovation Hub that examines nature backed currencies. The most pristine and threatened natural capital is in the Global South, but its value is not properly represented in central bank balance sheets nor in the current economic and financial paradigm. In this session, our Executive Director, Martin discussed the potential of nature backed currencies and how they can transform the current paradigms of our financial systems. Nature-based solutions have the potential to contribute to ⅓ of the mitigation necessary to meet the Paris Climate Agreement goal of keeping warming under 1.5 degrees C. Watch the video here.
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