Partnership to Accelerate Global City Network Access to Actionable Data to Address Climate Risks
C40 Cities and leading analytics platform Qlik are bringing the power of data and analytics to the fight against climate change. C40 will leverage Qlik’s analytics platform to create engaging, actionable data applications for its 96 member cities to gain valuable insights on performance, collaboration opportunity and world-changing policies. This partnership comes as part of the Qlik Corporate Responsibility program, which provides software and services to NGOs to transform their organizations through insights, advancing their ability to positively impact climate change and associated humanitarian issues through data.
“The urgency of the climate crisis means that city leaders must use every tool available to them to tackle the threats of climate change, with data among the most critical. Cities have shown their commitment to share data, ideas and learning with each other to help drive climate action further and faster. C40 is excited to work with Qlik to accelerate this work with the power of data and analytics,” said Mark Watts, Executive Director of C40.
C40 and Qlik launched the partnership at the recent Qonnections conference through the Qonnections Hackathon Challenge. The City of Boston and the C40 Cities network granted the Qlik developer community access to data about energy-use in buildings across the city. The challenge focused on creating applications to address building energy performance, and uncover opportunities for Boston’s building owners, businesses and residents to reduce energy use, energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
The Qonnections Hackathon Challenge delivered 8 solutions, with the winning submission coming from the Schneider Electric team, alongside second and third place submissions from Axis Group and Slalom. A full overview of the process and finalist solutions will be detailed in an upcoming webinar with Qlik and C40 Cities on June 20, 2018. The winning solutions focused on surfacing and linking a variety of data points around building KPIs such as ENERGY STAR scores and Energy Usage Intensity, and providing a deep dive into building category level data to compare buildings within groups, such as education facilities, and to compare buildings across groups (e.g. education facilities vs. manufacturing vs. retail.)
“Buildings account for nearly three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions in Boston. Anything we can do to make our homes and offices more energy efficient will be good for residents, good for our economy, good for Boston. Making strategic use of the building data we have is going to be key to achieving our goal of carbon neutrality by 2050,” said Austin Blackmon, Chief of Energy, Environment and Open Space for the City of Boston. “We’re excited to see the outcomes from this great initiative by C40 Cities and Qlik Hackathon Challenge.”
The Qlik and C40 Cities partnership has already begun to impact C40’s work through another session at Qonnections, the Late Night Lunacy challenge. During this session, developers worked on applications to uncover hidden insights through data around issues such as GHG emissions and climate hazards. The data used for these applications spanned a variety of data sets from all 96 C40 Cities, including information on emissions, climate hazards and climate actions. The applications developed during Late Night Lunacy will be made available to C40’s member cities to enhance data-driven connection and strategic analysis.
“Analytics has the power to transform organizations by bringing groups together through data to elevate their shared mission. Qlik is proud to partner with C40 to help city governments connect, collaborate, and enact policies that will directly address climate change and improve the everyday life of urban citizens around the world,” said Mike Capone, Qlik CEO.