2021| August 4 - Climate Data 2.0 Meeting #2

Second meeting for the CAD2 working group

Meeting time: August 4 at 8am PDT / 11am EDT / 4pm BST

7:45am/10:45am/3:45pm: Technical setup for zoom - breakout room tests

Facilitated workstream sessions will happen on this Miro Board

8am/11am/4pm: Introductions & Catchup- Todd open and facilitate

• Recap from last session (Angel)

• Timeline review from Wiki (Martin)

8:15am/11:15/4:15: Intro to Workstream topics and general expected outputs from the Working Group - Marco

Marco introduces this section and facilitates some quick Q&A

• Angel: Data Harmonization

• Martin: Digital Infrastructure

• Todd: Use cases

8:25am/11:25/4:25: Breakout Room - 3 Workstreams

Each workstream lead to organize a facilitator a scribe and a prompt for how to navigate the conversation and exercise. For each workstream, we will organize a ‘word cloud’ and a rapid ideation using this Miro Board

• Data Homogenization

• Digital Infrastructure

• Use-Cases and Policy Relevance

9:05am/12:05/5:05: Sharing back from Breakout rooms and Discussion:

Plenary facilitation from the representatives of each working group

9:25am/12:25/5:25: Next steps and NY Climate Week

• Closing remarks

9:30am/12:30/5:30: Session Ends

Meeting notes

Angel - Camda history and rational recap

• Community for credible climate action was founded ~4 years ago by group of people and organizations that are working in the non-state and sub-national actor space like universities and research organizations in partnership with champions of the UNFCCC

• Recognizing a need to be able to understand, measure, and track this groundswell of cities, regional governments, and corporate financial institutions involved in climate action that all of a sudden are a pillar of the Paris Agreement and key piece of the pledge review and ratchet mechanism

• We're at a tipping point where it's no longer good enough to just use what data and information is out there -- the "garbage-in garbage-out" challenge -- not saying that all data out there is "garbage" but we recognize that there are challenges in terms of comparability and data availability

• There are still a lot of actors out there that are participating in climate action but are not reporting on their progress, which makes it difficult to see how this adds up in an aggregate sense to get us closer to those climate goals

• Over the past 15 years, there has been little innovation in the climate accounting space so this working group asks the questions of how are we getting to a transparent climate accounting? To use existing data and understand present gaps and also consider the massive digital transformation with the internet and all type of digital technologies (such as sensors, the internet of things, to blockchain, to other types of satellite observation) - how can we capture these lightning fast developments into the space of climate action data and accounting?

• Understand where the needs and the demands of these types of technology applications are and how can we tailor the ideas we are generating to fit to very specific use cases?

Martin - Walkthrough of Wiki

• See the purpose of the Camda working group, initial slide deck, link for you to contribute directly

• Provide feedback and stay uptodate on expected activities and outputs

• Member directory to keep track of CAD2 participants

• Meetings tab for general meeting schedule and individual tabs on meeting output information

• General "umbrella" meetings and workstream specific meetings

  • Monthly umbrella meetings and workstream meetings in between so that there is a Camda meeting every two weeks

  • Workstream meetings (next Aug 18 and Sep 15)

Marco - Workstream overview

• Growing the community to align efforts and not create another "silo"

• Three different workstreams:

  • 1. Data harmonization

  • 2. Use case and policy implications

  • 3. Digital infrastructure

• Refer to wiki for additional information. The wiki is a living "document", please feel free to add and review

• Workstreams are interconnected which is reflected in the format of all calls. There is always time in the plenary to share workstream specific insights from the breakout sessions

For today's workstream breakout session

Angel - define what we mean by data harmonization?

• Use word cloud exercise to identify common points of reference with respect to the idea of data harmonization

  • Different data sets that measure some aspect of climate and policy performance - how does one piece of analysis compare to another piece? Are we measuring the same thing? Think about a framework to understand how the different pieces interrelate and how we can make sense of them

  • Technical aspects - how can we do analysis on existing data sets? Need for common definitions and nomenclature

  • Define key priorities and action items that we want to work on Martin - define what we mean by digital infrastructure

• Gather different perspectives through the word cloud exercise and select key terms to move forward

• Collective ideation of priorities and what we think are the action items coming out of this group

• Focus on actual technology as tools that can be implemented in the climate action space, such as internet-connected sensors, distributed ledgers, artificial intelligence, big data - how these things can be combined

• Similar to the internet which is our large scale infrastructure, based on open standards and protocols, as bottom-layer scaffolding

• How all of this can help to optimize inventories and cater to the use cases workstream in a more effective and low-cost way by providing the data plumbing Todd - why are we trying to solve the data issue? What problem is it actually trying to solve in policy or in disclosure?

• There are a ton of different use cases but knowing what these use cases also affect how data can be analyzed and vice versa

• Looking at policy relevance and different use cases might be applicable to your use cases but also thinking outside the box about how it can be useful to solving real-world problems

Summary from workstream breakout sessions

Data harmonization

• Breaking up data harmonization into three themes

  • 1. Comparability

  • 2. Standardization

  • 3. Machine readability & automation, processing

• How to define these terms and what are the issues within them?

  • Comparability at every level - different underlying assumptions, what is the truth here?

  • How do we compare even within different disciplines - e.g. how do we define a "company" or "country" - what are the boundaries?

  • Standardization for enhancing comparability. How do we make sure that we capture all the data related to a term (e.g. NY or New York)? How to do aggregation towards a single number? Machine readability - time-consuming to make data sets machine-readable that were not designed for it initially

Exercise from Miro for the Data Harmonization group

Digital infrastructure

• Similar themes and overlaps with data harmonization

  • Standardization of metadata and licensing standards

  • Interoperability through APIs

• Where to find and how to access the data?

• Trust - how do actors know they can trust the data?

• Key audience - the developer community but important that other actors such as policymakers also can use and access the data

• Making sure the data infrastructure is easily accessible (API, open-source) and standardization

• Outcomes & Opportunities: What do we need to build, what are we looking for? What do we need to build first, in terms of priorities?

• Next step: Digest the exercise! What do we know and what do we not know?

Exercise from Miro for the Digital Infrastructure group

Use cases & policy

• How to use the core of technical expertise and then think about to what end?

• When we talk about use cases, we really talk about what are the climate challenges and how do we use data credibility and accountability to drive climate outcomes?

• How can we make the data useful but also how can we partner with the other workstreams?

• What is the enabling environment to drive the data change?

• Think about how we can hold sectors accountable?

• Need of data to shine a light on what actors are doing in the public and private sector?

• Disclosure for the financial sector

• The role of innovation and the private sector - an important part of the ecosystem

• Use technologies on the policy synthesis side to take this work to the next level Opportunities in the UNFCCC global innovation hub to build Camda outputs in support

Exercise from Miro for the Use Cases group