SCHEDULE (GMT)
6:00pm – Intro
6:05pm – 4 lightning talks (10 mins each)
6:45pm – Panel discussion and community Q&A
7:15pm – Close
Laurence Watson: Improving access to climate data
Climate is rightfully getting the attention it deserves, but for innovation and interventions to thrive we need good data. Subak’s community of not-for-profit innovators have detailed many problems around finding good quality, trustworthy datasets, and from that starting point we set out to improve the ecosystem. Can we level up climate data with better technical tools, standards and a cultural shift towards openness? Find out in this talk.
Emelia Williams: Environmental Data as a Public Good
Environmental data, which takes many forms, is essential for effective climate action, environmental management and public health protection, but has not been prioritized as a useful tool. Current incentives, standards, rules, and regulations related to environmental data are not always workable for communities collecting and using data, nor for government actors who could use this data to better inform policy and decision making. An opportunity to make environmental data work better for us lies in recognizing it as a public good. This talk presents the opportunity to firmly establish environmental data as a public good in both the traditional sense of being non-rival and non-excludable, as well as in expanding the conceptualization of public goods to include utility and equity. To fully reach its potential as a public good, government, community, and academic stakeholders must address four major barriers: (i) lack of awareness of, (ii) overabundance of, (iii) the potential to misuse, and (iv) lack of infrastructure for environmental data resources. The data and its infrastructure must also be workable and useful for users with diverse experiences, capacities, and access to resources. The current political moment presents several opportunities for the use of environmental data as a public good in service of environmental justice and climate solutions. Any efforts to leverage these opportunities should also support understanding, accountability, and the need for useful tools and infrastructure beyond a single political cycle.
Anna Berti Suman: Ordinary people appropriate environmental information: a need to re-think existing legal frameworks and governance models?
My talk explores the intersections of civic environmental monitoring, law and governance. I start from the reality of local communities that self-organize in collecting and analysing environmental data in order to demonstrate breaches of (human and non-human) environmental rights. I question how such initiatives might challenge conventional distribution of responsibilities between appointed authorities, private actors and citizens. Existing legal frameworks and governance models may need to be reformulated to make space for citizen data in environmental decision making. I discuss how international frameworks like the Aarhus Convention could be expanded to include a civic ‘right to contribute to environmental information’ as public institutions fail or struggle to fulfil their duties.
Michelle Taute: Less talk, more action: Using data to accelerate building decarbonisation
Building decarbonisation requires actionable data – data that resonates across the value chain. But too often, projects are designed in isolation. The result? Misalignment and months of work on retrofits that cannot be practically delivered.
Join Tallarna’s Senior Strategic Sustainability Lead, Michelle Taute, to discover:
- How to deliver relevant building insights across thousands of properties at once?
- Why stochastic analysis unlocks actionable decarbonisation?
- What the industry needs to deliver at scale projects?