Digitally-enabling the Independent Global Stocktake

The “Digitally-Enabled Independent Global Stocktake (DIGS)” initiative seeks to revolutionize the infrastructure and processes underlying non-state actor climate action tracking, filling critical information gaps that hinder climate action transparency and reducing measurement and reporting burdens. Through this, the DIGS initiative makes non-state actor data available for the Paris Agreement and its Global Stocktake process and contributes to the collective effort by developing insights into data harmonization and open digital infrastructure.

The DIGS initiative aims to interconnect and harmonize existing datasets through digital infrastructure. The result is a comprehensive system whose cumulative value surpasses the individual worth of its components (Figure 4). This system would allow the overall impact to be assessed at different spatial and sectoral scales while preserving data privacy and ensuring access for decision-makers to evaluate performance. Therefore, the DIGS initiative strives to enhance the interoperability of the currently fragmented and diverse accounting infrastructures to improve climate accounting and establish a global structure to support the decentralized, bottom-up governance of the Paris Agreement.

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DIGS represents a joint effort among various organizations and communities to cultivate an open, decentralized initiative. The development of DIGS occurs through monthly meetings and collaboration along three primary avenues: data harmonization, policy, and digital infrastructure. These collaborations are leveraged to co-create a multilateral climate accounting and decentralized institutional framework architecture by conducting the following activities:

• Data model and Open data dictionary of NSA climate action – we are developing an NSA climate action data model that identifies key variables and indicators required to understand and track NSA climate action (e.g., baseline emissions data, emissions reduction targets and timelines, etc.). Metadata dictionaries that specify which data about datasets are required for transparency and understanding of NSA datasets will also be generated (e.g., methodological assumptions, etc.). These tools will be stored on an open Github repository.
• Standards research – convene a spatial standards working group, starting at the 2022 NY Climate Week, to define common spatial protocols that allow for jurisdictionally nesting data and climate actions, both for emissions and mitigation actions and nature-based projects.
• Global Stocktake Climate Datathon – In collaboration with the GST Co-Chairs of the Technical Dialogue, we organize through the CAD2.0 community an open call for data and tools to support the GST (both state and non-state actors) ahead of COP27.
• Architecture of federated data nodes – given that the DIGS initiative is based on the premise of decentralization of data and actors, this process defines methodologies to link existing databases, datasets and platforms in a federated approach, whereby data providers have self-sovereignty, engage in peer-based verification, and the information aggregated in relevance to the GST.