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.
In case you’re new here - a little bit about us. We are a not-for-profit organisation working to organise, analyse, and democratise data on climate policy: laws, policies, regulation, strategies, and international commitments like NDCs. We build tools designed to make understanding and analysing climate laws and policies quicker and easier than ever.
Our main web app allows you to find and search through the full text of thousands of climate laws, policies, and UNFCCC submissions from every country. You can also:
- See where your search terms appear in documents, with relevant passages of text automatically highlighted.
- Explore and compare different nations’ policies using country pages.
- Avoid the pain of “Ctrl+Find” - the tool automatically detects and highlights similar words (like ‘electric vehicles’ and ‘electric cars’).
In our first newsletter:
- Powered by AI: Climate Change Laws of the World
- Launching the Global Stocktake Explorer
- Public Product Roadmap: new features coming soon
- Events from Climate Policy Radar
- How to get involved
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Powered by AI: Climate Change Laws of the World
In May this year, we partnered with the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and launched 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.
The database gives people free access to climate laws and policies from all over the world, and is now powered by Climate Policy Radar to enable users to search the full text of documents. Users can also choose between exact match and semantic search for their search. Semantic search uses natural language processing techniques to identify semantically-related phrases: if you search for national laws and policies on ‘electric vehicles’, the search will also return ‘electric cars’ and ‘EVs’ as relevant terms, improving the sophistication and accuracy of users’ research.
You can now also see where search terms such as ‘electric vehicles’ appear in documents, with relevant passages of text automatically highlighted in yellow, making it quicker and easier to find information.
We’re continuing to work together to add new tools and data to this upgraded resource.
Launching the Global Stocktake Explorer
At the UN Climate Change Bonn Climate Conference in June, we launched the Global Stocktake Explorer: an AI-powered search engine to enable users to quickly and easily understand and analyse all inputs to the Global Stocktake ahead of the global UN climate conference COP28 in Dubai this December.
Designed to assess the global response to the climate crisis every five years, the first UN Climate Change Global Stocktake has pulled together over 1,600 documents with insights and recommendations from governments and non-governmental organisations around the world to help drive climate action this decade.
Our new prototype advances technical capabilities to understand and analyse the large quantities of relevant data by enabling users to:
- Search the full text of 1,600+ documents and 170,000+ pages of inputs
- Read documents submitted in all languages auto-translated into English
- Filter results to focus on critical climate action levers and impacts such as policy instruments, technologies, financial flows, and climate hazards
We hope that this prototype will help deliver immediate impact in support of the official UN process, and we are committed to rapidly iterating and improving our work – we would love to hear from you with any and all ideas, comments, challenges, and thoughts. Find out how to get in touch via our contact page.
Start exploring at gst1.org
Our data scientist Kalyan, who led the development of the work on the Global Stocktake Explorer, presented at the Turing Institute’s working group on knowledge graphs. See his slides here.
Public Product Roadmap: new features coming soon
In March we published our first Public Product Roadmap – sketching the steps we’re taking today to reach our (very) ambitious future goals.
Our work is centred around three strategic pillars that aim to address systemic challenges in climate decision-making: organise, analyse and democratise data. Our roadmap segments our broad areas of work against these goals.
We’re currently working to provide automatically generated summaries of documents, saving time and effort. In addition, we’re designing and experimenting with new ways to explore our database, including interactive maps and visualisations.
Check out our Public Product Roadmap to see what upgrades are coming next, and let us know if there’s anything you think we should add to the list.
Check out our Roadmap
Events from Climate Policy Radar
Our CEO Michal spoke at a Climate Arc - Chatham House event on how AI can revolutionise climate financing on June 26th at Chatham House, and at a UK-INDIA WEEK 2023 event organised by the India Global Forum also on June 26th.
Our CTO Henry gave a keynote at the CIO and Leaders Summit in Dublin on the 7th of June titled “ChatGPT, how can we save the world?”.
Our CEO Michal also spoke at the NLP for Sustainable Finance Symposium 2023 at Pembroke College, Oxford University on July 11th.
Here are some more opportunities to meet team Climate Policy Radar in person:
- ‘Digital Resources for Climate Law’ panel with our partners from LSE’s Grantham Research Institute, Sabin Center at Columbia Law School, and Laws.Africa at World Law Congress on Thursday 20th July
- WIRED Impact - London, 21 November 2023
Get involved: tell us what you think
Your feedback helps us design our tool better. Can you spare 20 minutes for a quick Zoom call with us? You don’t need to have used Climate Policy Radar, and you don’t need to prepare.
Sign up for a chat with our Product Manager, Alan.
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