Climate Watch.

Visualizing data for ambitious climate action.

Climate Watch is an online platform designed to empower policymakers, researchers, media, and other stakeholders with the open climate data, visualizations, and resources they need to gather insights on national and global progress on climate change.

Understand where countries stand on climate plans.

Climate is social.

In a world where everything is connected, climate action can also deliver social action. Climate Watch maps NDCs against the SDGs so policymakers can identify the policies and measures that will enable countries to simultaneously meet both climate and social targets. Climate change and sustainable development are closely entwined, and actions that address both can accelerate our journey towards a world that offers better opportunities for all.

Policy analysis. 

Tools and resources for policymakers, analysts, and researchers to assess the effectiveness of climate policies and track progress toward international climate agreements.

Combining sectors.

Analyze emissions across different economic sectors, including energy, forestry, land use, agriculture, transportation, and waste.

Country-level accountability. 

Understand global and national trends in emissions, mitigation efforts, and progress toward climate goals.

Developing the Climate Watch platform.

The brief.

The devastating storms, fires and droughts that sweep across our planet are stark reminders that our climate is changing. To stop these extreme weather events from becoming the norm, the world’s nations have to keep to their commitment to limit the global temperature increase to 2.0°C above pre-industrial levels. World Resources Instutite, with a host of partners, created Climate Watch to help policymakers, researchers and other stakeholders assess our progress towards this pledge and inspire more ambitious climate action to reach our goals faster.

Our role.

We worked with WRI to test their initial assumptions and define the scope of the platform. Through conversations with their partners and potential users, we designed a compelling prototype that we then built into a tool that makes it easier for people to analyze national climate pledges, historical greenhouse gas emissions data, and the links between climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Delivered with impact.

Transparent information; leveling the playing field.

Advanced search functions and interactive visualizations offer a new level of transparency that aims to inspire more ambitious commitments. As governments and civil society work together to address the most important issue of our lifetime, Climate Watch will ensure people have access to the most accurate and comprehensive data for decision-making.

Each country’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) has been extracted from PDF into HTML format, making them easier to search and compare, and therefore more transparent. People responsible for writing NDCs can see what other countries have pledged and match or raise their ambitions. Through this open approach, countries can learn from one another and go further together.

Analysis and comparison.  

  • The Historical Emissions module compiles over 150 years of emissions data from three major data sources.
  • Country profiles offer a national-level snapshot of climate progress, risks and vulnerabilities. Compare up to three countries at a time.
  • The 2020 NDC Tracker follows which countries have stated their intention to update an NDC by 2020, and how many have submitted a 2020 NDC.

Open Earth Monitor Cyberinfrastructure.

Decentralizing access to global data.

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