Climate Action

 

With growing urgency to address the climate crisis and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this project is bringing diverse communities together  to collect and map the environmental impacts and disclosures of companies, in order to showcase where and how companies can take action. Though SDG13 Climate Action is at the center of the project,  climate change has effects that cut across each of the Sustainable Development Goals, which means that all of the SDGs research on WikiRate contributes to the outcomes. 

Compiling the Public Picture: The Top 100 Greenhouse Gas Emitters 

In tandem with the beginning of COP25, the UN climate conference, the project Compiling the Public Picture: The Top 100 Greenhouse Gas Emitters was launched, to focus research on large companies who have the greatest leverage and responsibility. Through this project, volunteers and students are collecting research and data from a wide range of methodologies and putting them on WikiRate.org for open analysis, where citizens, alongside policy makers and investors, can learn concretely about companies’ impacts.

The project encourages people to use their voice to reach out to companies that are doing or publishing clearly enough. 

In addition to capturing company performance data, relationships between companies and investors, and companies and suppliers will be mapped, to allow a wider range of organizations to take responsibility for their value chain and make needed improvements. 

Find out more about the project in our video below and check out our page on the Plan A website. 

Context-based metrics 

With the Paris Agreement of 2015 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate the transition to a lower-carbon economy, new methodologies are being developed to assess company impacts. These metrics contextualize reported figures in relation to ecological limits - for example, by calculating how many degrees Earth's temperature will increase if other companies emit carbon at the same rate as a particular individual company or industry. 

Through Calculated metrics on WikiRate, context-based metrics will help showcase companies’ climate footprints. 

Capturing risk

For investors, climate change poses significant challenges and opportunities. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) has been created to develop guidelines for what constitutes effective financial disclosures across industries, and to help companies understand what investors want from disclosure in order to measure and respond to climate change risks, and align disclosures.

As the process to identify metrics and align disclosures develops, WikiRate is able bring relevant reporting standards onto the platform to research trends and gaps in corporate TCFD reporting, and support dynamic analyses of the data.  

Visualizations

WikiRate is developing dynamic visual tools that can capture the outputs of analysis, pulling directly from the platform API. This means that the visual tools (graphs, company comparisons) can be embedded on other websites and used by journalists, NGOs, investors, etc. and will automatically update with new data added to WikiRate.org.

On the lookout

If you know or work for an organization interested in evidence-based advocacy, or in helping to define key metrics and research projects around corporate climate impact, get in touch at info@wikirate.org or through our Contact Form.