ClimateView started as a 4m long poster.
In 2018, founder Tomer Shalit took Sweden’s energy transition and visualized a taxonomy that, for the first time, made sense of the complex problem. From event to event, the poster garnered “ooo's” and “ahh's” as it revealed new insights to all who looked at it. The poster turned into a digital co-development project with the Swedish Climate Policy Council, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the Swedish Energy Agency and energy company Vattenfall. That initial pilot has since evolved to be the Panorama project – the centerpiece of governmental climate accountability and transparency in Sweden. For the first time, a nation’s transition was explained in a single interactive page.
In 2019, the team continued to develop the product and began piloting with local authorities in Sweden, Germany and the UK. It turned out that cities too, needed new insights and tools.
From Nottingham in the west, to Umeå in the north, the ClimateView team train-hopped their way around Europe, learning of the challenges the city climate strategist delt with in tackling the biggest task their city has ever faced.
As UN Secretary General António Guterres says, "it is in cities where the climate battle will be won or lost”.
In 2020, we set about building a systemic solution to the very apparent systemic problem. This led to the innovation of Transition Elements, universal building blocks of the transition. Mini-models representing the shifts from high to low carbon activity. Simple in concept, powerful in calculation. Transformative in application. The Transition Elements, each an agent in an agent-based model, created for the first time, a codified transition analysis of the city system.
In 2021, together with innovative toolkits like the interactive ‘Scenario Builder’ and the turnkey plan visualization ‘Dashboard’, the Transition Elements were brought together in ClimateOS - an integrated data, analytics and visualization SaaS platform for city climate planning.
In 2022, having built the tools for operationalizing climate planning, we set out on solving the remaining big challenge facing city climate action: the enormous gap in funding. The agent-based model was extended to include costs and co-benefits, enabling for the first time, cities to connect emissions reductions and economic impacts across the city system to make the case for climate action.
In our view, every year is a year of action for climate. And 2023 will be no different for ClimateView.
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