Company or Institution

Climate Policy Radar

Industry

Environment

Website

https://climatepolicyradar.org/

Country

United Kingdom

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

General description of the AI solution

Climate laws and policies are the make-or-break of our way out of the climate crisis into a thriving, sustainable future. Yet identifying effective policy approaches, modelling risk and maintaining accountability have not been straightforward, with data locked up in a black box of, unstructured and inaccessible data – unstructured, disparate, multilingual PDFs, with no standard taxonomies.

To date, identifying and assessing law and policy approaches required manually identifying the relevant documents, and trawling them for detailed answers. This approach is laborious, manual and insufficient – and further exacerbated by regional data disparities, language barriers and anecdotal echo-chambers.

We are opening up that black box: by harnessing leading data science and AI (machine learning and natural language processing) methods, we massively scale and automate the collection, organisation and analysis of previously untapped data about climate laws, policies, and legal cases worldwide.
We are creating an unprecedented resource of free, structured and accessible information on climate change-related laws and policy interventions globally.

We are training AI algorithms to automatically parse masses of text from PDFs and HTMLs across diffuse resources – from government websites to climate negotiation documents. Our text classification models increasingly enable us to identify and link useful concepts across thousands of climate documents. For example, identifying policy instruments, legal principles, technologies, or extreme weather events. Over time, we will then build on this work to develop an open and free knowledge graph that will accelerate climate policy evaluation, modelling and risk analyses, guiding decision-makers so that they can design and implement more effective climate change strategies.

Github, open data repository, prototype or working demo

https://github.com/climatepolicyradar/
https://app.climatepolicyradar.org
https://github.com/climatepolicyradar/open-data

Publications

United Nations Environment Programme (2022). Adaptation Gap Report 2022 (forthcoming).

United Nations Environment Programme (2021). Adaptation Gap Report 2021: The gathering storm – Adapting to climate change in a post-pandemic world. Nairobi.

Forthcoming paper about different values in climate laws and policies (with Green and Finnegan, UCL, forthcoming)

Forthcoming paper about climate targets in climate laws an policies (with Setzer, Higham, Bradeen, LSE, forthcoming).

Needs