After months of build-up, COP26 is taking place this week in Glasgow, bringing together tens of thousands of world leaders, speakers, and delegates to find solutions to the environmental problems facing the planet.

It seems hard to overstate the importance of the event. Faced with a rapidly closing window to meet commitments to stop climate change, such as limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius, COP26 has an eleventh hour feel to it.

In his opening address, COP26 President Alok Sharma noted: “COP26 is our last best hope to keep 1.5 in reach.”

And Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speech called for action, rather than talk and commitments, to keep climate change under control.

While early deals have emerged to slash methane emissions and deforestation, it will be a long time before we know if COP26 was a success.

However, no one solution, deal, country, or event can solve the enormous challenges threatening our environment. It will take a concerted effort from every nation, industry, company, and individual.

DIGIT was in Glasgow to attend the DEFRA Tech for Climate Action exhibition. This showcased multiple companies and the digital technology and innovations they are developing to help mitigate emissions and achieve net-zero by 2050.

Data and Sustainability

Data offers a powerful tool to fight climate change. It allows organisations to identify efficiencies along with the insights of how to implement them.

As such, to make the most of data, a pipeline needs to be developed – one that gathers data, collects it and presents it, and creates and incentivises actions to protect the environment.

An example of this is the system that multinational IT company CGI were displaying at the event. The company revealed a plan, developed in partnership with Project Seagrass, to use satellite technology to monitor seagrass around the world, including off the coast of Scotland.

By collecting organic matter that sinks to the sea floor, as well as performing photosynthesis, sea grass provides a vital mechanism for collecting carbon dioxide. With its lengthy coastline, Scotland has abundant seagrass fields, providing an ideal carbon sink and helping sustain marine wildlife.

DIGIT spoke with Vice-President of Consulting Services at CGI Dr Jaime Reed about the company’s new project.

With collecting data at the heart of digitisation, getting good information on seagrass levels is the first step to protect it.

“What we’ve been doing is using satellite data to map seagrass at very large scales across the entire UK coastline,” Reed says.

Human-focused

However, once the data has been collected, the question becomes what to do with it. After all, the amount of data needed to make informed decisions are often too much for a person to handle.

With CGI’s seagrass project, with enough data, changes in seagrass levels can be tracked over time. Analysts can work out if this is due to seasonal changes, or if the hand of man is behind it.

“One of the problems with data that is unstructured is it’s hard to understand what it actually is,” Reed says. “And that’s often a bigger challenge than people recognise, to actually structure that data.”

That is why collating, processing, and presenting data is so important. Several companies at the Tech for Climate Action exhibition were showcasing their dashboard services. These rationalise myriad data sources and help present them in one place.

But even though data-driven solutions often seem to hold all the answers, the human element can never be discounted. Data exists to help people make decisions.

Dashboards allow users to find relevant data without having to trawl through multiple spreadsheets and crunch the numbers manually, saving time. As such, ease of use is essential – people need to to see data quickly, presented succinctly, and only see what is relevant to determine its value.

For some, being able to dive deep into the statistics is important. But for others, getting a story at a glance, even from just one or two numbers, is what they need.

This also helps move analytics out of the hands of experts and reach a wider audience. After all, meeting climate change targets requires a concerted effort from everyone.

Taking Action

But the biggest advantage of this is that it allows people to act. Ultimately, all the data, insights, pledges and promises are worthless without practical steps that can be taken. Data-driven platforms not only help reveal what these actions are, but can help incentivise people to take actions.

Atos, a France-based multinational IT company exhibiting at the event, offers a CO2 tracking dashboard, My CO2 compass. By linking the dashboard’s metrics to management bonuses, they incentivise the company to cut its carbon emissions. And consolidating the information and presenting it clearly, it helped management understand what actions they need to take.

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For CGI’s seagrass project, data can yield insights into what is damaging seagrass levels and what actions are needed to stop this.

“We’re hoping the UK sets up a lot of maritime conservation zones,” CGI’s Reed explains. “And at least in those areas, we should see an improvement.”

At present, seagrass isn’t part of the UK’s carbon budget, in part driven by a lack of understanding.

“That’s the first step,” says Reed. “It needs to become part of the national carbon budget. It’s fine to get to net zero based on the current carbon budget, but what happens if something that’s not in that budget is releasing lots of carbon dioxide?

“We need to see the whole picture.”

Luckily, there are often economic benefits to making climate friendly decisions.

“People see tackling climate change sometimes as a side effect,” Reed said. “I think we can often see it the other way around, where projects specifically designed to tackle climate change and carbon dioxide emissions can have a knock-on benefit elsewhere, such as reducing energy costs.”

Despite how important protecting the environment is, one of the best ways to do so is to make it easy. COP26 has made it obvious that the challenges presented by climate change are still immense. It will take hard work from everyone to meet them, and technology offers a way to relieve some of that burden.

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