Guest post —Maria M: OMG CLIMATE — Tech for political action
This is one of a series of guest posts from OMG CLIMATE attendees, covering each of the nine sessions at OMG CLIMATE in Berlin on May 25th.
This abridged post covers the notes from the “Carbon Offset as an API” session on the day, from attendee Maria M.
We have technology to address the world’s climate issues, but decision- and policy-making has lagged behind. In this session we explore the question:
How and when could tech tools help in driving political action to address climate change?
We could build tools that help to inform voters.
- In the UK, the Policy Tracker tracks which policies were agreed upon, and which ones actually got implemented. This holds politicians accountable to their voters.
- There could be a tool to help voters decide which party to vote for, by evaluating the party’s platform from a climate perspective.
- Fake news is an ongoing problem. Fact checkers could help. However they are difficult to implement and the user interface would need to be really simple. As a really ambitious idea: we could have a fact-checker that gives politicians a score real-time as they are talking.
Alternately we could target the decision-makers and help them make informed decisions. This could be information about voter opinion, or emissions data.
- One idea was to show voter sentiment to the politicians, to visualize how important an issue is to voters.
- Someone was working on a visual dashboard for politicians so they can drill down into where emissions are coming from, by country/region and industry sector.
- Someone else mentioned a carbon.txt for websites, similar to robots.txt, to voluntarily disclose carbon information. (This is more for consumers than for voters/politicians.)
When building these kinds of tools, we need to be aware of potential bias or conflict of interest so the tool is trustworthy. If people don’t trust the tool, it will not be useful. Open-source could help with transparency, whereas a tool made by a think-tank (yes even a sustainability think tank) would be questionable/untrustworthy. The tool should also be clear/easy to understand, even for those who are not tech savvy; and it should be actionable.
Some links to things mentioned in the discussion…
- Carbon Disclosure Project — https://www.cdp.net/en
- Sustainability Accounting Standards Board https://www.sasb.org/
- Behaviour change model —
E — easy
A — attractive
S — social
T — timely
