Workstreams
Reliable digital data collection tools and systems are integral to accurately record and track the non-state actors’ climate pledges and progress.
🌐 Reliable digital data collection tools and systems are integral to accurately record and track the non-state actors’ climate pledges and progress.
This transparency is essential to understand the distribution of achievement and challenges to better coordinate or ‘orchestrate’ global climate efforts (see ‘The Climate Orchestra’). Considering the Paris Agreement doesn't provide a designated mechanism for non-state actors to directly report their actions to the UN Climate Secretariat, an open data aggregation and accounting process is needed. This system, utilizing innovative digital and data practices and working alongside the official Global Stocktake mechanism, would offer non-state actors a platform for climate transparency and accountability mechanisms and objectives.
Data on non-state actor emissions inventories and climate actions are diverse and scattered across various platforms and domains, making it essential to foster 'interoperability.' This term refers to the free flow of data between different systems, data types, and standards. It's all about integrating the influx of new datasets and sources while ensuring we can trace and track everything (NASEM 2022). Earth observation and sensor data, in particular, present new data streams that we need to merge with legacy data processes, such as national inventories, which are often consisting of self-reported information.
Emerging digital technologies (like decentralized distributed ledgers for data storage and earth observation or sensor data) enable data integration across different governance levels via 'nested accounting.' This nested approach records emissions at one level (say, a specific local project or facility), and then incorporates these into higher levels—like municipalities, regions, and countries—into national and international processes, like the Global Stocktake (Schletz et al., 2022) (Figure 3). In this way, every level of climate action is connected, from local to global, ensuring a comprehensive view of progress.
🌐 Transparency and decentralized data ownership are imperative for effective climate action and digital technologies offer potential to decentralize and democratize climate data.
In a world increasingly driven by digital technology, a transparent and decentralized approach to data is more important than ever for climate action. As greenhouse gas emissions information becomes increasingly central, transparency in the underlying data, methods, and associated uncertainties is crucial (NASEM 2022). While digital technologies hold immense potential to decentralize and democratize data, they also pose significant challenges. Care must be taken to ensure these systems do not inadvertently amplify information disparities or favor certain stakeholders (Green and Kuch 2022, Gordon 2016).
It's encouraging to see how technologies, such as distributed ledgers, democratize and decentralize data and information flows to prevent disproportionate control by any single institution or group of actors. This scenario appears more inclusive and reflective of the diverse range of actors in the global climate governance landscape, encompassing both state and non-state entities. Such decentralized frameworks ensure transparency and immutability (Schletz, Hsu, Mapes, et al., 2022). For example, distributed ledgers offer the promise of data sovereignty for individual actors due to their decentralized, immutable, and transparent nature, and automated data collection and verification techniques, boosted by AI/ML, could eliminate the need for powerful data intermediaries such as auditors, verifiers, and certifiers of disclosed information. By lowering barriers to participation and potentially speeding up review and verification through AI/ML tools, digital technologies could foster a more inclusive transparency (Hsu and Schletz, 2023).
However, the specter of a big tech data monopoly looms large. The centralized infrastructure approach, often favored by corporate entities, is incompatible with the bottom-up and decentralized spirit of the Paris Agreement.