
Latest from Climate Policy Radar
Mapping climate policy: navigating context-specific language (Part I)
Finding relevant climate policies is already a challenge—but it’s even harder where language is context-dependent. In our latest blog, Anne Sietsma unpacks the mapping tool CPR developed to show how climate terminology differs across the globe.
Humans of AI for Humanity: Michal Nachmany
Meet the leaders who are putting AI to work for good. “Humans of AI for Humanity” is a joint content series from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and Fast Forward. Each month, we highlight experts, builders, and thought leaders using AI to create a human-centered future — and the stories behind their work.
Medieval strategies for modern business
Tech startups are using guilds to build more quickly, collaboratively and to push progressive policies
CPR joins Coalition for Sustainable AI
CPR is delighted to be a member of the Coalition for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence, a community of stakeholders to advance concrete initiatives for making Artificial Intelligence beneficial to our environmental goals
Flexible working at CPR
At Climate Policy Radar, we want to create the best possible work culture. Our four day work week is an important part of that.
Planning for disaster
Maths, museums and building bicycles: Harrison Pim
In the latest instalment of our series introducing you to the brilliant people behind Climate Policy Radar, we spoke to our Senior Data Scientist, Harrison. Read more to find out about what a day-in-his-life looks like working at Climate Policy Radar, and why data science is like ‘trying to build a bike in the dark’.
COP29 panel: How will AI redefine sustainable value?
COP29 Interview: We Don’t Have Time
Don't miss this important conversation with Michal Nachmany about using AI to make climate policy information accessible.
The Multilateral Climate Funds launch Climate Project Explorer at COP29
Climate finance collaboration – building a custom app for the Multilateral Climate Funds
Why the future of our climate will be decided beyond Baku and Belém
Climate Policy Radar’s products
Letter Cali to Belém: United action on climate, nature and food transformation – for our peoples
The AI-Powered Nonprofits Coding a Greener Future
Steven Ramage joins Climate Policy Radar’s Board
The UN Global Stocktake, community-based adaptation and baking fresh bread: Sarah Goodenough
Using machine learning to classify climate targets
With the first biennial transparency report (BTR) submissions due to the UNFCCC this year, and the next round of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) in 2025, all eyes will be on targets: reporting on targets, and progress against them.
Experts from the World Resources Institute and Climate Policy Radar discuss biodiversity and climate change
Biodiversity loss and human impacts are becoming a key component in climate change conversations. Experts discuss their views on how biodiversity loss and climate change are also impacting the financial sector. The conversation was part of Insider's event "For a Better Future: Bridging Culture, Business, and Climate," which took place on Tuesday, April 18, 2023.
NLP, Friday rituals and connecting the dots: Matyas Juhasz
In the fourth instalment of our series introducing you to the brilliant people behind Climate Policy Radar, we spoke to Matyas Juhasz about Natural Language Processing (NLP), what drew him to policy, and the day in the life of a data scientist.
Podcast: Totally Sust #3 - Using AI to better understand climate policy data
In the latest episode in TechMarketView's series of Totally Sust podcasts, SustainabilityViews’ lead analyst, Craig Wentworth, interviews Henry Franks (Chief Technology Officer at Climate Policy Radar) about how they're using AI to extract value and meaning from 100,000s pages of climate regulations and data the world over—and what uses this insight is being put to (and by whom).
Data Engineering, Rugby Sevens and Algorithms: Mark Cottam
In the third instalment of our series introducing you to the brilliant people behind Climate Policy Radar, we spoke to Mark Cottam about the appeal of climate policy, his role as a Data Engineer and balancing sporting commitments with work.
Tech for Good, Schmidt Futures and getting lost in the sauce: Alanna Flores
For the second instalment of our new series, introducing you to the brilliant people behind Climate Policy Radar, we spoke to Alanna Flores. Alanna spent the last 6 months working in Climate Policy Radar’s data science team as part of Schmidt Futures Technologists for Global Transformation, a programme designed to broaden the pool of technologists working for public benefit. As we bid Alanna farewell, we caught up with her about her time at Climate Policy Radar and the programme.
Good Climate Solutions Need Good Policy—and AI Can Help With That
Announcing over $6.8M of new funding for Climate Policy Radar
Climate Policy Radar is thrilled to announce that it has secured over $6.8 million in new funding from multiple funders: the Environmental Defence Fund (EDF), Google.org, Open Society Foundations (OSF), The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Sequoia Climate Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and Quadrature Climate Foundation (QCF).
Apprenticeships, flight simulators & guide-dogs: Katy Baulch
The value of user research
When we started building Climate Policy Radar, we had lots of assumptions about who our users were and what solutions would help them. User research has helped us ensure our research tool meets the needs of the people we’re building it for - mainly “knowledge workers”. These are people processing large quantities of messy textual data: policy analysts, academics and risk modellers. In this blog post, we’ll explain why we carry out user research, how we’ve done it so far, what we’re learning, and some of the improvements we’re making in response.
New feature: English translation of climate law and policy
Climate Policy Radar’s search tool breaks a critical research barrier by enabling users to search non English law and policy documents, and see English translations of passages that match their search.
AI-powered tool launches to unlock 170k+ global climate documents
Newsletter: Augmented Intelligence
Welcome to Climate Policy Radar’s first newsletter! We have been busy over the last few months, and we have some exciting updates to share with you.
Online Tool Helps Users Explore Inputs to Global Stocktake
Using Augmented Intelligence to support the UN Global Stocktake
The technical phase of the first UN Climate Change Global Stocktake came to a close at the UN Climate Conference in Bonn last week. The Global Stocktake, which is designed to assess the global response to the climate crisis every five years (and this year, for the first time), has seen together over 1,600 document submissions with insights and recommendations from governments and non-governmental organizations around the world to help drive climate action this decade.
What the rise of AI means for the climate fight
Climate Policy Radar and Grantham Research Institute launch revamped research resource
We’re delighted to launch our upgraded version of the Climate Change Laws of the World database, offering new tools and features to make it easier to understand and analyse the global climate law and policy landscape.
Climate Policy Radar selected in global top 100 AI projects for sustainable development
We’re delighted to announce that Climate Policy Radar has been named among the world’s most promising projects harnessing artificial intelligence to advance the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.
Climate Policy Radar selected for Personio Foundation’s Impact Portfolio
We are delighted to announce that Climate Policy Radar has been selected as one of the seven new organisations to join the Personio Foundation’s 2023 Impact Portfolio.
Climate Policy Radar launches public product roadmap
Transparency is one of our core values, and it threads through everything we do and advocate for. We believe that being open about our own processes and priorities will lead us to make decisions that are rooted in the needs of our users and stakeholders. It will enable us to move, iterate, fail, and retry faster, in the face of the growing climate emergency.
“We need to be daring”: How climate tech can get us to net zero
Experimenting to make climate policy documents easier to digest
We recently experimented with some common natural language processing techniques to turn climate policies and laws into timelines of the dates mentioned within them.
New partnership with Climate Parliament will provide free information resources to support climate legislation
We’re delighted to announce our partnership with The Climate Parliament to provide legislators and policymakers worldwide with data and knowledge resources to help advance timely, ambitious and effective climate action, and enhance their role in the implementation of the Paris Agreement in the run-up to COP28 and beyond.
Greening the UK steel industry: behind the headlines
The British Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is expected to confirm this week that the UK’s two largest steel manufacturers, British Steel and Tata, will receive a total of £600 million in support to incentivise the decarbonisation of the sector, and will consult on further measures. The move speaks to the extent to which climate policies are interdependent on a global level.
Open source, tech for good and archery: Peter Hooper
Here at Climate Policy Radar, I’m looking forward to helping create software components in an open way that’s useful for other people with a similar mission, so together we can draw more people into sharing as a community, and avoid reinvention.
Hacking AI for climate policy
In November, we teamed up with OpenAI for their first hackathon dedicated to climate change. Its aspiration was to explore how AI – specifically language models – could help drive ambitious climate action, drawing parallels with what we do at Climate Policy Radar. We threw data into the ring by building and sharing an open repository on GitHub of all the data we have in our searchable open database: over 3,000 documents covering climate laws and policies from every country.
Responsible AI, foraging and linguistics: Kalyan Dutia
Meet Climate Policy Radar data scientist Kalyan Dutia. He shares his love of linguistics, the opportunities and challenges of responsible artificial intelligence, and exciting developments in the field of machine learning for climate change.
New partnership launches AI-powered global climate law and policy database
The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, and Climate Policy Radar are delighted to announce a new partnership to offer upgraded open data resources on global climate laws, policies and legal cases.
PDF Parsing: Using AI to turn (messy) climate policy documents into (readable) structured data
PDFs were designed for creating and viewing flexibly formatted documents without the user having to worry about which device, operating system or browser they were using. This versatility revolutionised information sharing. Yet the lack of formatting constraints made extracting structured information nearly impossible. As most climate-relevant law and policy documents are PDFs, this presents a challenge to our goal of making them fully searchable.
Climate Policy Radar at COP27- where to find us
We’re headed to Egypt for the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP27 and related events - find our activities below and keep an eye out for new developments.
Building natural language search for climate change laws and policies
There is no guide book to tackling climate change. So often, the best way to figure out what works and what doesn’t is to learn from evidence, so that decision-makers can replicate successful decisions and avoid failed ones.
“I felt a renewed passion for helping solve climate change” - CPR welcomes first work experience student
At a time when doom and gloom dominate the discourse, they lead, inspire, and teach. So when 17-year-old student Bella got in touch with CPR seeking inspiration and wanting to shadow us for a day, we knew we wanted to swing our doors wide open:
Climate Policy Radar launches public changelog
Openness and transparency are the kingpins of Climate Policy Radar, which is why we’ve launched a public changelog so that anyone and everyone can follow what we’re doing in the climate tech space and the progress we’re making.
Climate Policy Radar features in tech.eu
Climate Policy Radar has nabbed the spotlight in tech.eu, an online publication dedicated to European technology ecosystems.
Climate Policy Radar launches its global climate policy database
We’re delighted to announce that we have released the first version of our first product, Climate Policy Radar (Alpha), which allows searching through the full text of thousands of climate laws, policies and strategies worldwide.
Lisa Long joins Climate Policy Radar Board
We are delighted that Lisa Long - a serial entrepreneur, non-executive director, and private equity advisor - has joined Climate Policy Radar’s board as a non-executive director.
A treaty on plastic pollution - what can we find in national policy documents?
Climate Policy Radar want to support the search for solutions to the crisis of plastic pollution, using our tool for searching across the full text of thousands of policy documents.
Climate Policy Radar is back from Glasgow's COP26
CPR went to COP26 in Glasgow ready to share our work on our prototype, join conversations and learn from the wealth of knowledge and perspectives on offer there. Now back in the office and fired up from the experience, here’s what I gained from the summit.
Announcing CPR's partnership with WORLD Policy Analysis Center
We are excited to announce today that Climate Policy Radar (CPR) is partnering with WORLD Policy Analysis Center to advance joint work to map and analyse the global climate policy landscape and situate in a broader context of social economic and environmental legislation and policy. We will be collaborating with WORLD to develop tools to bring together all the world’s laws and policies that matter to climate change mitigation and adaptation across an array of domains, in a readily accessible way.
Climate Policy Radar at COP26
We are going to Glasgow for COP26, and we'll be taking part in some exciting events and conversations about data, AI and evidence-based climate policy, sharing our vision and collecting inspiration, new ideas and allies..
Our Origins
Climate Policy Radar's origin can be traced back to 2009, on the fringes of the COP15 conference in Copenhagen. At that time, GLOBE International—a cross-party network of parliamentarians focused on improving governance for sustainable development, founded by the likes of Al Gore and John Kerry—struggled to answer fundamental questions about climate legislation.
Announcing Climate Policy Radar - on a mission to map and analyse the global climate policy landscape
Climate Policy Radar is a climate data start-up on a mission to map and analyse the climate policy landscape globally, to support evidence-based policymaking and investment to drive the transition to a low carbon, resilient world.
Events
If you're attending any upcoming events and would like to meet the Climate Policy Radar team, reach out.
⬤ Upcoming events
London Climate Action Week: The Climate Innovation Forum, Wednesday 25th June
The Climate Innovation Forum returns for the seventh year as a flagship event of London Climate Action Week on Wednesday 25th June. Taking place in London’s Guildhall, this high-level event will bring together 2,000 business leaders, policy makers, investors and senior civil society representatives, to accelerate the speed and scale of our collective efforts in driving climate action.
Embracing the UK Government’s renewed climate ambitions, the Forum will be a key event to facilitate multistakeholder collaboration for increased action and impact on the Road to COP30. With 2025 marking 10 years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement and just five years until the critical deadline of 2030, it will focus on the practical steps required to keep 1.5ºC alive: unblocking delivery barriers, getting investment flowing where it’s needed, and sharing best practice that can be replicated at speed and scale.
Key Speakers Include:
Francesco La Camera, Director General, IRENA
Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All, and Co-Chair, UN-Energy.
Professor Piers Forster, Chair, Climate Change Committee
Hakima El Haite, former Minister of Environment for Morocco and President, Private Sector Pan African Alliance
Nick Mabey, Founder, London Climate Action Week
Noelia Garcia Nebra, Head of Sustainability, ISO
Lord Adair Turner, Chair, Energy Transition Commission
Faustine Delasalle, CEO, Mission Possible Partnership
Rt Hon Chris Skidmore, Chair, Climate Action Coalition
⬤ Past events
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ACL 2024: Natural Language Processing meets Climate Change
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London Climate Action Week: Climate Innovation Forum
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RELX SDG Inspiration Day: In the Age of AI
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TICTeC 2024
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Berlin Buzzwords
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ICLR 2024: Climate Change AI workshop
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Climate Week NYC
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Global ESG Monitor 2024 launch