Supporting Climate action through online activities & the data that powers it

This talk was first given at the PyData Sudwest BBQ in July 2022

Transcript

1. Supporting Climate action through online activities & the data that powers it
2. IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee, April 2 2022, on staying within 1.5 degrees of warming “We can’t wait for speculative climate tech to save us” “We are at a crossroads. The decisions we make now can secure a liveable future. We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming” Reference 1
3. Jessica Greene (she/her) @sleepypioneer Software Engineer @ Ecosia Community Leaders @ PyLadies Berlin
4. Contents 01 The responsibility of tech companies & professionals in the climate crisis 02 Ecosia’s mission to support people take more sustainable actions online 03 The data required to power this 04 The challenges we face 05 How we can all work towards a better planet!
5. 1 We are in a climate crisis largely because we keep burning fossil fuels, instead of finding a path off them
6. 1 Emissions from burning fossil fuels to make our products Scope 1 Emissions from electricity generated on our behalf, to run our products Scope 2 Emissions from activity in our supply chain Scope 3 How to allocate carbon emissions, communicated through the medium of popular hot beverages
7. 1 Are we responsible for our user’s carbon decisions? Current business models either don’t recognise the carbon responsibility of companies or pass it on to others.
12. 153,415,152+ 15 million 500+ 35+ 60+
19. Where is the data?
20. 1 https://github.com/calgo-lab/green-db/blob/main/core/core/sustainability_labels/sustainability-labels-evaluation.csv Product sustainability labels
21. Challenges Collecting, cleaning and understanding data in this field is currently a time consuming tasks which requires experts in the domain. 1 To few items have sustainability information Not all labels are standardised For clothing different category taxonomies are not easily mappable Data sources require a lot of cleaning
22. Partnership with domain experts from the BHT & TU https://green-consumption-assistant.de/
23. The Green Database Open data set, currently fueling the Ecosia Shopping Vertical https://github.com/calgo-lab/green-db
24. Goal Building Sustainability into the standard Add sustainability labels as a standard to schemas for products as part of schema.org https://schema.org/Product 1
25. Support advocating for sustainable software where you work
26. Switch to Ecosia for your search engine, if you are stuck use #g  
27. Follow the GCA project and support us to make standards better & more transparent
28. We cannot do it alone!
29. Let’s keep the conversation going! If you have any questions or want to connect, please add me on LinkedIn and Twitter linkedin.com/in/jessica0greene/ twitter.com/sleepypioneer