So, my name is Tobias Augsburger. I'm part of the Open Sustain Tag community, also known
as Open Sustainable Technology. I would try to make this actually a happy talk, even if the
topic itself is not that happy. So, it's about disrupting the destruction of our natural
world with openness, and this is a series of talks we want to make, and this is especially
about traceability and accountability, because most people don't understand why open source
open signs and all this open movements are so relevant when it's especially comes to trace
ability and accountability. So, we are small community of people that come together and just
try to find out actually what are the open source projects that are out there in this space so far
and where are the gaps, and we are analyzing them creating a database all out of all those projects
with about 2,500 projects at the moment, and those insights we create talks like this one.
So, at first you might know that we have a serious problem that we have to face,
so actually our natural world is going to die because of climate change. So, we are at the moment
at about 1.5 degree, global heating, we might end up at about 3 degree, that's actually my,
yeah, this is what I guess at the moment, depending on the current political
climate, I would call it of ignorance and hate and fascism, so it might even be that we end up
at 40 degrees, this is not very unlikely, and why do you trust me or why do you
should trust the IPCC report, most known report about climate change, that's one very simple question
because every plot of the IPCC report is completely open sign, open source, you can go there
and have a look how those plots are being created, and I come to this more and detail now,
so those scientists really try to open everything up that is being about climate change,
and how they actually are analyzing climate change, and how they are doing forecasts in climate change.
So, the reason why they exist climate change is because there's nobody else who can actually
open up all this models or all this data to this proof climate change, keep this in mind,
this is a very good idea how to understand how you actually test if somebody actually has sustainable
intentions or not, so what does this people do, they use open signs and proof open signs that
comes traceability, they use open data mostly from satellites and on C2 data, they use a lot of
open source models and open source tooling to analyze the data, they execute all this data on
machines that you can have to have a look on with maybe a Jupiter notebook, et cetera,
then they have open forums, you can just join making issue, you can just make a request or have
just ask a question, and they open up all of this in an open publication, you can all have a look
into it, so that's the key actually to sustainability that those people found by just opening up
all their signs, all their data, they just proof sustainable intentions, and this is the most relevant
if you're doing a forecast, because maybe the forecast is not correct, maybe something is wrong
with your model, it's something is wrong with your data, but if you open it up you can at least
go into discussion about your data, about your signs that you're doing, and that's why this is
so relevant, so what if you look into, so I wasn't academia, but I was also working quite some
years before that in the industry, if you look into the industry, you see a lot of
soil signs, actually soil signs is the state of the art in the industry, for example, for years
ago you could go to to shell, and if you're just, we're getting some gasoline into your car,
you can say yes, I want to do a carbon offset for one stand per liter, and this was so just
a lie, and everybody who really knows about sustainability in about climate was saying yeah,
if it's just one stand per liter, why are you just starting now with that, and what is people
who are doing that just planting somewhere, some trees, and then we say yeah, the trees with
some rock grow, and there's some of compensators, carbon you have created, and then some
years later on there was an article in the Guardian that just found out that actually almost all
those carbon offsets that are actually used to compensate your emissions were just a lie,
but you unfortunately find similar lies also on products all around the world, like here from Germany,
some beef, that is just saying yeah, if you eat this beef, you are actually protecting
natural resources, this is standing there, it was the WWF sign, so this is really absolutely
a lie because beef is the worst thing you can do for climate or the environment, and this is well
known through the whole sustainability community, so the problem we are facing today is not that
we are missing the technology, we are missing the good numbers, and we are missing good profits,
so we have a lot of false profits that just tell you lies in like in parliament, et cetera,
but also a lot of business people, so they tell you renewable energy is unreliable to expensive,
but they even again don't have any numbers to prove that, they don't have any models,
but nevertheless we still allow those people to speak, that is real severe problem, the same
goes that actually climate change itself, not a severe threat to humanity, there's a lot of
signs around us that is actually severe threat, and all those signs have been opened up to the world,
nevertheless the journalists and people just pick up some paper that found without any data
will fit without any model that is just saying it is not the case, so this is like really
again and again the same pattern that you will see, you will also see that it can be reversed,
there might be technology, but there is no proof that this technology can access
get enough and it is economically sensible, so the solution to this is instead of just always asking
what is actually sustainable or not, you are not an expert in climate, you are not an expert
in biodiversity, you cannot judge if a product is sustainable or not just because you might think that
I buy now this hybrid car, this is sustainable or not, the most relevant indicator or proxy for
sustainability itself is how open was the person who is doing this claim, so has he opened up
his data, has he opened up his numbers, has he opened up his models, has he actually creating a
forum that he can discuss his claims, so that he at the end might end up after some discussions
with other scientists in something that you can call the fact, so this is something that actually
sounds totally stupid, but it's like if you would just create a label instead of all those
other labels that just measuring how open are those claims that you put on something, this is
much more relevant, you just multiply those score, like it's like the notary score, you notary score,
you multiply the claim sustainability with the open score and you come actually up with a trace
of sustainability, and this is what matters, is this what is being told to you trace
with some or not, and you can prove, you can look at it, you don't need to be an expert in climate,
but you can look into a paper, you can look if there's the data, it's the software available,
is it open access, is there a GitHub account maybe of this project, and this is the most relevant
indicator, so that's continued this forth, so maybe what we really need is actually labels
that are open science, and maybe we can combine them with a QR code, so this QR code will bring
you to open sustainable text, not to label, but it will, it's just as an idea, so if you combine
both of them, you would have actually a way to look on a product, to scan it, and then to have
the data behind it, and I don't mean that like a nice report, I mean the Jupiter notebook,
the data that really is something that you can just trace back, where does those numbers or those
claims that somebody is doing coming from, and if there's just open access and there's no data,
no models behind it that you can have just a look at, then maybe it's just false claims, so
you can use this for all those labels and you can just trash all the rest of the labels,
so open science is really like, if you would have an open science label, it would really
significantly change how we preserve sustainability and how we rate actually sustainability as a consumer,
so let's bring this to one example, let's look on the beef example, okay, so here's just
how you could do it, you could do it, and that's what I want to tell you, actually the solution
to a lot of problems that we're facing today in climate change is false numbers, so we have to
fix the numbers, and how do you fix numbers nowadays with open source, that creates the best
numbers in the world, right? So you take like an open platform like global forest watch or
the trace platform that gives you the agriculture supply chain, then you take an open source package
like forest at risk, then you put all of this in an open execution way like a Jupiter notebook
that just somebody can click on it and execute it by himself and have just a little
code things are computing, and then you create a forum so that people can just ask questions,
why do you use this data, not this data, why you use this model, and after that you try to
create a nice plot, and this, if like a career could bring you to such a chain of knowledge,
this is really proof sustainable intention, and this creates the opportunity on the long term
actually to create numbers that we can really use, so what you can go one step further,
you can just say yeah, we are giving so much subsidies to the fossil fuel industry like billions,
but nevertheless we are society, we don't track what those people are doing with those
money, even if today we have a proof about climate change, we give them billions, billions
and billions again, but we don't enforce them to open science, so I was working in a European Union
project of sports about traceability in climate, and I met people there, they are doing
like this point-source emission measurements, and they told me and I was like yes we have a problem
because the fossil fuel industry doesn't work with us, we don't know how much emission
actually from such a point-source from an oil refinery is actually coming out, so we are measuring
it for the satellite, but we have no way to validate our own data, so even today those industries
doesn't work with societies to actually at least they should help to close the leakages,
but I must also say we as an open source community we also failed, because we build so much
platforms open street map, but why is there no open emission map that is really a community-based
project, there's something like climate trace, it's from algors, the closed source project,
I don't trust it because it's closed source, right? They do, it's an open data platform at least,
but you don't know how they detect calculations, nevertheless even if it's now 2025 we have
not as a community really created an open platform, there's one platform from Australia called
open methane, it's really focused just in Australia and it only measures methane emissions from
Australia on point sources, but it's so unpopular this project, I think free star something like that,
right? You can, it's like it's such a relevant topic but nobody cares, like I've seen this in
this area so many times and what I really think, what really could change things, if if we give
this first of year industry subsidized we should enforce this by openness, they should install
sensors at their emissions point source emissions and give this to communities so that they can
validate those their satellite-based emission methods. This would create actually a way to actually
trace and make them accountable for what they are doing, but we still don't do this and I don't know
why, I don't know and I do this talks now for years, I don't know why we don't bring much more
science and openness to sustain the ability itself, there's so much opportunity that it's actually
there, you can even, I think you can even make a lot of business out of this nowadays, but nevertheless
we are a little bit like say lost in our own world too much instead of solving actually real
well problems that are out here and it can be solved with numbers and the technology like
I see a lot of cool technology enforce them and I love technology that's not a problem, but we
have to, there's so much cool technology like the satellite data that you can use this satellite
data to do this observations is freely available, the tools is also freely available, you can
do this, you can build a community around this and it's just the matter of that there is actually
the interest also and the movement inside all of us to do this, so as actually last slide
and I hope that is something you have understand that openness is really the key proxy to sustainability
but because you never know if somebody's maybe did something wrong with this forecast, but at least
every forecast that has been made that is really relevant for our society for our future should
be completely open and if it's not open just dump it really just ignore it if there is some paper
and if you just reading a newspaper article and you don't find an open access paper behind it
but maybe even if the paper behind it is not open access then maybe it's just some created
by some political interests of business interests, so thank you so much and I hope it was a little bit
happy