Climate
Environmental Insights Explorer
Cities as diverse as New York, Berlin, Oslo, and Rio de Janeiro have committed to reducing their carbon footprint by 80 percent within the next 30 years. These cities rely on huge carbon data sets as a measuring stick to help identify where they may be able to cut emissions. But many cities lack the resources to gather data such as building emissions, making it hard for them to set firm carbon commitments of their own.
The Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE), a new online tool we created in collaboration with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM), is designed to make it easier for cities to access climate-relevant data that can help them set and achieve ambitious carbon reduction goals. By analyzing Google’s comprehensive global mapping data together with standard greenhouse gas (GHG) emission factors, EIE estimates city-scale building and transportation carbon emissions data, as well as renewable energy potential, leading to more globally-consistent baselines from which to build policies, guide solutions, and measure progress.
Electricity is the juice that feeds the global economy, helping people to escape poverty and helping countries to improve standards of living. At the same time, many negative side effects to this current power generation systems affect health, water resources, and the climate. Decision makers, advocates, companies and investors need access to transparent, highly accurate power plant information to manage these trade-offs.
The Global Power Plant Database addresses this challenge with a comprehensive, open-source dataset on the world’s power systems. Through open data, the platform and its tools will help catalyze accountability for policy makers, businesses, and investors and will inform and drive the transition to a clean energy future while reaching development targets.
Stay tuned and get involved at https://resourcewatch.org/data/explore/Powerwatch
