How cities can use data to track their climate goals

[HollyJohnson]

We are often asked by educators in our Academic Program for use cases around how data is used in the real world. This story, about our collaboration with C40 cities, can be used in the classroom to help educate students on how we can counteract climate change with data.

[HollyJohnson]

Since 1993 the city of Portland, Oregon, has been at the forefront of the fight against climate change with it's climate action plan. This is a plan they continuously update, the newest version being the 2022 Climate Emergency Workplan. Portland had much success with implementing incentives and voluntary changes, but with many competing issues facing a city of its size, they needed the support of residents and local businesses when it came to prioritizing the climate.

 The best way to evidence the need for climate action comes from data, so the city of Portland partnered with Qlik and C40 cities to shape their efforts with data driven solutions. “I think it's incredibly important for people everywhere to have access to good, reliable data because we need that in order to properly understand how grave and great and urgent a problem climate change is,” agrees Rachel Huxley, director of knowledge and research, C40 Cities, with whom Qlik have collaborated. “There's a huge amount of noise out there – good data helps cut through that to show where the real problems and solutions lie.”

With help from Qlik Sense, C40 cities has developed climate dashboards that can be used by cities like Portland to monitor engagement, document best practice and mentor other cities.  The dashboard can help cities see how they measure up to key metrics and how they benchmark against other cities. Eventually this data can lead to the acceleration of local climate action and investment.

Portland understands that it is of the upmost importance to understand where cities can have the most impact, and this has lead them to look at their emissions data from a different angle. They now consider the consumption based emissions of their residents, something that is often forgotten about. Consumption based emissions are the emissions generated in the production of goods and services according to where they were consumed. Understanding these large sources of emissions is vital for managing and mitigating their impact, and doing so has helped Portland to greatly reduce local emissions.

There are nearly 100 C40 Cities following in the footsteps of Portland, to read more about this story follow this link to the full article - How cities can use data to track their climate goals.

 For more information about our Qlik Academic Program, go to qlik.com/academicprogram.