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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.