Climate stakeholders are an orchestra that require conductors to support cohesive sound.
Effective solutions to climate change require leveraging actions from various levels - local, regional, and international scales.
Climate change is a multifaceted problem that requires coordinated effort at all levels of society - from governments to a myriad of city and regional governments, private businesses, and financial institutions (collectively, non-state actors or NSAs). To develop effective solutions that leverage actions from all of these levels, from local to international scales, adopting a perspective that envisions different stakeholders as an ‘orchestra’ can help us understand why alignment and coordination through data transparency are critical to work towards a collective climate goal.
Orchestration facilitates a cohesive approach to environmental and climate action across diverse stakeholders.
International relations scholars (see for reference Abbott et al., 2020; Chan et al. 2015; Hale and Roger 2014; Hermwille 2018; Mai and Elsässer 2022) have discussed the need for ‘orchestration’ through data transparency in the global climate governance landscape. Orchestration is the process where a “conductor,” often an international organization or a set of actors, coordinates or guides the activities of other actors towards common goals, thereby creating a cohesive approach to environmental and climate action.
The Paris Agreement's bottom-up and decentralized ethos has shifted the approach to climate coordination.
As this orchestration role is getting more and more complex, due to the growing number of actors that want to and need to play a role, it is no longer feasible for a small number of conductors to guide and coordinate all members of the orchestra (both state and non-state actors). Previously, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC Secretariat used to coordinate and guide national Parties, but with the advent of the bottom-up and decentralized Paris Agreement ethos, centralized orchestration is no longer feasible. Instead, the CAD 2.0 community envisions a decentralized approach, where digital tools enable multiple actors, both national government and non-state, to coordinate. Such tools, methodologies, and platforms specifically relate to the harmonization and building of open digital infrastructure, which we will explore in-depth on this website.
Expanding data scalability is necessary to capture information from all players across different scales and sectors.
At the same time, the tools providing transparency of all actors’ data are far from sufficient to allow the successful orchestration of climate challenges. There are several issues with the current data transparency attempts that need to be resolved (UNEP 2023):
Enhancing data granularity: Detailed tracking of progress is needed to incentivize actions through carbon markets and climate finance, while also addressing risks such as double-counting and greenwashing.
Figure. Existing climate accounting gaps that are causing climate orchestration challenges (left, in red) across the various actor levels (right, in blue) for state and non-state actors (from Schletz, Hsu, Mapes, et al. 2022).
In June 2023, the UN Climate Secretariat introduced a "Recognition and Accountability Framework" designed specifically for non-state actors (UNFCCC, 2023).
This framework encourages NSAs to uphold the integrity of their net-zero commitments by regularly reporting greenhouse gas emissions data. The aim is to establish systems and processes to verify these data through the GCAP (UNFCCC, 2023). Although this framework represents a positive advancement in conveying the significance of NSA action credibility at a higher political level, implementation and compliance is still a major question. Current methods for non-state actors to report greenhouse gas emissions or verify emissions reductions are often "expensive, prone to mistakes, and time-consuming, frequently relying on manual procedures and face-to-face surveys" (World Bank, 2022). Additionally, there's a significant imbalance in climate data information flows, with the majority of NSA information and data originating from Europe and the Global North (Hsu et al., 2016; Kuramochi et al., 2021).
Digital technologies offer opportunities for transparency, accountability, and climate action orchestration.
The emergence of digital technologies presents both opportunities and challenges for transparency and accountability and general climate action orchestration (Hsu & Schletz, 2023). Technologies such as Earth observation satellites, Internet of Things sensors linked through intelligent digital ecosystems, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and distributed ledger or blockchain technologies (Große-Bley & Kostka, 2021; Hsu, Khoo, et al., 2020; Kloppenburg et al., 2022; Kostka et al., 2020; NASEM 2022; Schletz, Hsu, Mapes, et al., 2022; Hsu & Schletz, 2023) have the potential to tackle significant climate data, information, and transparency issues. These tools can be beneficial for improving orchestration based on data transparency and accountability across all scales. Earth observation and IoT data are increasingly viewed as alternatives to self-reported data. Satellites routinely monitor Earth from a distance, and sensors can gather detailed data nearly instantly in digital infrastructure systems (Hsu, Khoo, et al., 2020). When combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms (Rolnick et al., 2019), these new data sources can be efficiently analyzed and integrated on a large scale. Furthermore, they could potentially link with distributed ledgers (also known as blockchain technology), forming a decentralized, transparent system that automatically tracks climate actors and actions (Schletz, Hsu, Mapes, et al., 2022) (Figure 2).
Figure. United Nations Environment Programme (2023). Strengthening Climate Data Management and Transparency - how national experiences and new digital technologies can strengthen the transparency efforts of non-state actors