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).
The funding, all secured in the last months of 2023, will support and accelerate our core mission to organise, analyse and democratise data on global climate law and policy.
Understanding legal and regulatory frameworks is crucial for transitioning to a low-carbon, resilient, and just world. Accurate, timely, and comprehensive data are essential for informed policy making, accountability, and financial decisions such as investment, lending, and insurance. This is why we are building the world’s largest open knowledge-base for climate law and policy, combining best practices in data science and AI with our deep expertise in climate policy. Our work to provide open and accessible data to organisations and individuals acts as an impact multiplier, accelerating action and saving resources.
Nearly 350,000 users from over 100 countries already use Climate Policy Radar’s platform, which enables searching through half a million pages of national climate laws, policies and UNFCCC submissions (like Nationally Determined Contributions) from every single national government. Over 6000 documents are fully searchable and auto-translated to English from all languages, helping bridge critical information gaps and blindspots.
But that’s just the beginning. This generous funding will allow us to continue working on three main pillars:
- Creating the ‘one-stop shop’ for data. We will expand the scope of available data by adding thousands of additional documents - subnational policies, climate-related litigation cases, corporate disclosures, reports from statutory bodies like central banks and national audit offices, publications from industry bodies, and more.
- Helping people make sense of that data. We will continue to transform the massive body of dense, rich textual data into structured data, and develop tools to interrogate and synthesise it. This includes using generative AI to help accurately and responsibly answer critical questions that underpin decision making.
- Working within our ecosystem to accelerate impact. We will continue to foster and expand partnerships and collaborations with a wide and diverse range of stakeholders, working together to learn from each other and strengthen our collective impact. We will also continue to convene and grow the first community of climate Natural Language Processing researchers and practitioners. Fostering collaboration and mentorship, this community will continue to work together towards breaking new ground and scaling the application of AI in the climate space.
Running through all these pillars is our deep commitment to equality and justice - ensuring the needs and voices of the people who contribute the least but are most impacted by the climate crisis are well-represented in our methodology, tools, data sets, and stakeholder engagement. Apart from making our tools and datasets free and open, this also includes correcting and preempting biases in data and our machine learning models. We take seriously our responsibility in providing climate data, our eyes wide open not only to the opportunities but also to the risks of applying AI to these sensitive data and use cases.
We are very excited to continue and scale our important and audacious mission to support evidence-based decision making, and are incredibly grateful to our supporters and allies for their generosity and trust.
\ For enquiries, please contact info@climatepolicyradar.org.