Image via Wikimedia Commons.
C40 Cities, a network of global cities dedicated to taking urgent action on climate change, has partnered with data analytics platform Qlik to create actionable data products.
One year on from Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement climate accords, the commitment of remaining signatories, individual cities and states to take strong action on climate change is more vital than ever before.
The C40 Cities climate leadership group was launched in 2005, with the goal of highlighting the critical role that urban centres — and their leaders — must play in the Herculean effort needed to take action to prevent catastrophic climate change.
The group now represents more than 650 million urban residents worldwide, accounting for one quarter of global GDP, and has recently announced a partnership with the Cliq data analytics platform to help deliver performance insight and drive collaboration opportunities for its 96 member cities, which include Sydney and Melbourne.
The partnership was launched at the recent Qonnections conference with two hackathon events, and is part of Qlik’s corporate responsibility program, which provides software and services to NGOs. The City of Boston and the C40 Cities network granted the Qlik developer community access to data on energy use in buildings across the city. The challenge focused on creating applications to address building energy performance, aiming to uncover opportunities for Boston’s building owners, businesses and residents to reduce energy use, energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
The winning solutions focused on surfacing and linking a variety of data points around building KPIs, such as energy star scores and energy usage intensity, providing a deep dive into building category level data to compare buildings within groups and across economic sector and function.
“The urgency of the climate crisis means that city leaders must use every tool available to them to tackle the threats of climate change, with data among the most critical. Cities have shown their commitment to share data, ideas and learning with each other to help drive climate action further and faster. C40 is excited to work with Qlik to accelerate this work with the power of data and analytics,” said Mark Watts, executive director of C40.
The second hackathon has already yielded outputs that could extend C40’s work globally, according to Qlik. During this session, developers used a range of datasets from all 96 C40 member cities, containing data on emissions, climate hazards and climate actions. The applications developed during this session will be made available to C40’s member cities, who will stand to benefit in future from access to the new analytics platform.
