Open data and tools for climate policy
Our open, cost-free and AI-powered tool is the first of its kind. It allows you to quickly and easily search through the complete text of thousands of climate change interventions, laws, policies and litigation cases from every country. Use our data to identify climate policy gaps, opportunities for action and examples of best practice.
Our data
Our current climate policy database consists of thousands of laws, policies, strategies and action plans from all national governments.
The data are sourced in collaboration with the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE.
We are working to add additional documents, including submissions to the UNFCCC, and laws and policies from sub-national and local governments. We will source these by:
Collaborating with international, sectoral and regional database providers.
Extracting law, policy and strategy documents (‘scraping’) from government and other websites.
Crowd-sourcing documents.
If there is a dataset you think we should include, please get in touch.
Data science and AI
We use innovative data science and AI methods to turn masses of unstructured text from climate policy and legal documents into structured, usable and useful information.
Extracting text: document parsing
We are building and training machine learning models that can automatically read and extract text from PDFs and websites, enabling us to structure and share information from thousands of law and policy documents.
This will mean we can massively ramp up the speed of data collection as we find new data sources. Access our GitHub page for more information.
Natural language search
Our application of machine learning is tackling blind spots in policy research by making it quicker, easier and more intuitive to search climate policies and laws.
Our tool identifies similar and related terms to search queries, so there is no need to rely on typing specific keywords into the search bar to find relevant information. Find out how our natural language search works.
Text classification and information retrieval
We are training machine learning models to identify and link useful concepts across the texts of thousands of documents. This will allow understanding of, for example, how governments address different extreme weather events, or regulate various environmental technologies.
Using existing taxonomies and new bespoke ones, we will help identify concepts quickly, pinpoint trends and highlight gaps.
Multi-language approach
Search in English, find results in all languages: We are working towards allowing our users to input a search term in English but get results from documents that are published in different languages, plus an English translation.
User interface in other languages: We will use machine translation to offer our tool in other languages, including all six official UN languages.
Open knowledge graph
We are working towards an open knowledge graph that joins the dots between points in our growing structured dataset, revealing gaps, risks and opportunities.
This will open up the ability to explore our data in new ways, and connect it to other datasets and APIs to start to measure the impacts of policy decisions.
Analytical tools
We will develop tools to allow stakeholders to generate their own insights, including linking our data with ‘real-world’ external data like carbon emissions.
This will make it easier to link actions to outcomes, and facilitate modelling of policy effectiveness and risk analyses.
Sharing knowledge and resources
All our data are free for anyone to access and use through our web tool. We are also working towards releasing a set of open APIs so that individuals and organisations can use our codes in their own programmes of work.
Soon we will launch data visualisations to make it easier to explore and contextualise trends in data, working towards analyses and publication of our insights.
We regularly post updates about our progress on our blog and changelog.
Our users
The data and knowledge we generate are open and free to everyone. But we believe the people who will benefit from them the most are: