All right, great. Hi, everyone. My name is Evan Podromo, and I'm here with my colleague,
Melon Grunner. We're from the Open Earth Foundation. Open Earth Foundation is a nonprofit
established to make open source software to fight climate change. And we're here to talk
about city catalyst, which is our flagship product for building greenhouse gas inventories
for cities.
All right. So, first off, what is the greenhouse gas inventory? Basically, it's a climate
accounting tool that allows you to catalogue all greenhouse gas emissions within a city,
at least in our case. It's sorted by the different sectors and sub-sectors, different
gas as well, the different scopes, so inside or outside of the city boundary. And it's
basically a list of highly modern emissions, highly modern estimates of emissions that are
based on activities that are occurring within the city. All of this is defined by a
standard specification called the GPC or the GHG protocol for cities.
All right. And why all of this matters at all is the only way we can really reduce the
emissions worldwide is by reducing the activities. And this emissions inventory that we
are creating here allows the city to know where that it could apply to the funding best
and fund new programs in order to reduce them. Really there's no point in investing in reducing
emissions from sources that barely affect your cities, so it's really good to know where
you want to focus your resources.
The emissions inventory is also a necessary first step for cities to get financing for climate
action, so they're really important in the darkway guards.
I'm just going to take a closer look at my view, we hold the clicker. So as we said before,
about 70% of worldwide emissions come from cities, so very high amount of our worldwide
emissions come from cities, but only 5% of cities are have a published greenhouse gas
inventory. And that's because it's challenging to put together a greenhouse gas inventory
to obtain the data necessary to publish information for all the different sectors, whether
they're stationary energy or transportation, wastewater, agriculture or industrial. It also
takes a lot of skill and time to put together the systems, be able to drive the necessary
outputs from the input data.
Good, no matter.
Okay.
So what we're doing here to overcome it is we built a web app to allow you to create GHD inventories.
This is a web front end, basically a shared repository for inventories and also for user
data that can be used for collaboration. It's also a data warehouse for GHD related data
organized by city. And we have a separate so-called global API that makes it easy for this
web front end to import only the relevant data, so only for your specific city, let's say.
As well as guided input system that can be used to consider here. If there's no third
party data available, and you need to enter the data that you get from the say your energy
companies and so on manually.
So for the implementation, we have built this using a bunch of different open source libraries.
So for instance, it is built on React, TypeScript, it's next JS, for the IW using track
UI in the back end, it's using standard postpress database and then the SQLize or M to connect
to it also we're using authjs to make the authentication easier and standardize it and
then smaller libraries like Neville for charts, pigeon maps for the city map, sort of validation
I18 next for internationalization because this is already available in three different languages.
And in the back end, let's say decimal JS in order to have precise calculations.
The back end itself is also part of the same next JS application,
order to facilitate a sharing of types of conditions and also functionality with the front end.
And the separate global API that we built for accessing data sources,
that is there that different city catalyst instances can connect to.
It's built on Python, face the fast API, the postpress database again, and the post GIS
systems, so we kind of geometric primitives on the globe.
Then the last part is the data pipeline that imports all of our huge data sources
that's built using Python pandas and MATI and the process of those data sources into the
GPC standard so it can be grouped by individual cities.
And what we get out of that is a mechanism that makes it very easy for even
untrained city personnel to put together their first climate inventory.
We're doing a first pilot project in Brazil with 50 cities in Brazil.
They're putting together their first JS guys or first greenhouse guys.
Oh yeah, thanks. First JS, yes, thank you. First JS, first JS, first climate action plans,
as well as climate change risk assessments using the city catalyst platform.
We collaborate with local consultants in order to identify relevant data sources,
but that we bring them into the platform to make them publicly available to any city.
And we are playing to expand this program in Brazil and also bring it to other cities around the world.
All right, and we are using an
open source, we are an open source repository. So you are all welcome to contribute.
First off, of course, just creating issues on GitHub helps, reporting bugs, proposing features.
You can open more requests in case you familiar with TypeScript and React and want to help out.
Or just reach out to us, give us feedback, let us know where you would like to use this.
This due accordingly is to our repository, but it's also linked in the talk information.
All right, any questions? Thank you.
You want to take questions for?
Yeah, so we are using a lot of remote sensing data, particularly satellite information.
So the satellite regularly takes screenshots or photos of areas, and then you can sort of estimate
by the amount of smoke that is coming out of factory, let's say, how much emissions there could be.
So we're using a lot of open data sources that can be made available to the city there.
But the data sources really vary widely, we can use data that's based on fuel sales within the city.
And we can use that in order to estimate how much fuel was burnt for different processes.
We may have industrial data, we do use satellite data for things like agricultural changes.
Right, so if crops have changed or forests have been deforested, we can actually detect that with satellite data.
We don't do a lot of that data work ourselves.
There are a number of really great projects like climate trace, the IEA publishes data,
at Garp publishes data, we tend to take that data and chop it and slice it so it works for the individual cities.
Great question, thank you.
Yes, in the back.
What kind of entity?
Yes, sure, the question is, what kind of entities are using city catalyst right now?
Yeah, so I think I had it in the previous one, we're working with a pilot project in Brazil
with the Brazilian government and 50 cities in Brazil.
I know that there are other users around who are doing pilot projects, but we don't have
tracking, so we're not exactly sure who else. Is that a fair answer?
Yeah, I think our target audience is really city governments or consultants in the climate space.
Yes.
Yeah, so that's where it really breaks down by scope.
Yeah, sure, the question is, are greenhouse gas inventory just about the gases that are emitted within the city
or does it cover economic activity within the city also?
And the answer is yes, it covers economic activity that happens within the city.
There are three scopes that we call them. Scope one is for fuel that's burned within the city.
Scope two is for energy that's used from power generation and then scope three is for
economic activity that happens outside the city. That's it for us. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.