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.

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.

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.

We recently experimented with some common natural language processing techniques to turn climate policies and laws into timelines of the dates mentioned within them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..