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.
By opening up the global climate policy landscape, our search platform will make it easier to examine the measures that have been implemented to tackle climate change, enabling a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. This will also help to hold leaders accountable for their decisions, while shining a light on the costs of inaction.
Our goal is simple: we want to help governments take more effective, timely, and evidence-based climate action, thus driving forward the transition to a low-carbon, resilient world.
Over 250 civil servants, academics, and members of international organisations and civil society globally have joined our first group of users. Launching our Alpha product is a golden opportunity for us to learn and improve, as we prepare for our full launch later this year.
If you want the world’s climate policy data at your fingertips, you can access our Alpha product for free on our website. By joining our growing global community, you can help us towards our mission of improving the evidence base for evidence-based policymaking.
Mapping the global climate policy landscape
We know from our own research and experience that the current climate policy landscape is fragmented, difficult to access, and time-consuming to analyse, with vast swathes of text and lengthy documents scattered across a myriad of sources.
This makes it difficult for decision-makers to find the information they need to design and fine-tune climate measures, while researchers can find it challenging to analyse the impact of decisions that have already been made, like how much dirty air could be taken off of our streets by introducing more cycle lanes.
Our product is creating a one-stop-shop climate database to answer these pressing needs, making policies easier to navigate and draw insights from. Our efforts towards this end are threefold: bringing this patchwork of information together; using cutting-edge data science to make this information more useful; and presenting the resulting information in an easy-to-digest format via our platform. Think of it as Google for the world’s data on climate policies, laws and pledges.
This means that rather than having to manually scour through endless documents, such as to find out who has implemented carbon tax policies, our platform will do the searching for our users, presenting all of the relevant and related information that’s available. This will save countless hours of labour-intensive searching and take the guesswork out of policymaking, enabling researchers to carry out exploratory research to understand the different options that are being implemented in policy to tackle different issues.
Check out how it works in the images below, which show how you can search and explore policy documents in our growing climate policy database.
Enter your search term to get started
View your search results
Quickly find the parts of the full text that match your query
Clicking on one of those paragraphs will take you to the actual page in the document
View a summary, additional data, and links to associated documents
Building on Climate Change Laws of the World
Our current offering brings together over 3,000 national-level law and policy documents derived from the Grantham Research Institute’s Climate Change Laws of the World (CCLW) database (which Michal led for years and where the idea of CPR was born!).
The resource covers laws, policies, strategies and action plans documents from every single national government globally - and information concerning climate change mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and disaster risk management. In the future, we will also cover sub-national legislation, and even city policies. We will bring in more data sources, including UNFCCC documents like NDCs and National Adaptation Plans, and even laws and policies that don’t spell out climate change but are critical to tackling it, like planning, health or trade.
We will continue improve the search function and develop more sophisticated ways to analyse the data, including adding classifications, enabling people to identify categories like green technologies, policy instruments, and climate targets. We will also develop data visualisations that will help people using the platform to see the big picture and drill down into the data in a more useful way, such as looking at clean energy trends over time.
We’ll be sharing updates on our progress towards these goals in due course, so be sure to follow us to hear the latest developments from Climate Policy Radar. Core to our purpose is ensuring that our knowledge source is not only reliable but open, accessible, and community-driven. And so if you’d like to help shape this exciting journey, access Alpha and follow us on social media.
