The One Planet Data Hub announced by French President Emmanuel Macron and Michael R. Bloomberg, UN Special Envoy for Climate Ambition and Solutions at a bilateral meeting in Paris seeks to create a global effort to enhance transparency to monitor business climate actions and commitments in the fight against climate change. This will provide for a new Climate Data Steering Committee that will bring together international organizations, regulators, policy makers, and data service providers to provide advice on the creation and design of an open-data public platform that will collect, aggregate, and standardize net zero climate transition data based on private sector climate commitments.
Although there are private sector players who have committed to net zero, these cases are not reported consistently, nor is the underlying data that drives these pledges. Existing data platforms are inaccessible to the general public besides lacking comprehensiveness. All this prevents regulators, investors, and other stakeholders from evaluating business and financial institutions on their material climate risk and progress toward net zero.
“The transition to a net zero economy is a journey we are engaging through altogether as a society: governments, businesses, and citizens. I’m convinced that standards and transparency will be key in this race to zero: standards because this is how we can make sure everyone has the same understanding of actions and commitments, transparency because it incentivizes ambition and ensures accountability. These are the ideas behind the One Planet Data Hub which I launched in October last year. This global partnership with UN special envoy for climate Michael Bloomberg intends to help ensure and monitor how the entire private sector is genuinely becoming green and contributing to the net zero ambition,” Macron was quoted saying.
“Through the UNFCCC Race to Zero and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, private sector leaders have made bold commitments to tackle climate change, but often find their hands tied by a lack of accurate data. It’s a big problem at the heart of the climate battle, and this partnership will help to fix it,” Bloomberg was quoted saying. “Transparent, standardized data will help investors make informed decisions, encourage more companies to disclose their emissions, and allow the public to see which companies are leading the way. It will also make it much harder for companies to ‘greenwash’, or make empty promises that don’t actually cut emissions, by forcing them to back up words with action. France has been a leader on data transparency, and we’re looking forward to working with President Macron to address this challenge and speed up global progress.”
The creation of an open-data platform will bring transparency and accountability to the commitments companies and financial institutions have made through UNFCCC’s Race to Zero Business Ambition for 1.5 C and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
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