The Climate Action Navigator (CAN) is a dashboard with open data tools that provide highly localised analysis to support evidence-based climate action decisions. It currently offers assessment tools for walkability, bikeability, heating emissions and land use change.
The Climate Action Navigator is an open source tool that is open and available for use by anyone who is interested in it. However, we do have a target user group, which includes non-government organisations, citizen initiatives, researchers working on urban sustainability and climate action, and city administrations. Our aim is to empower those who want to act with facts.
Not at all! CAN is open to be used by anyone who is interested in our assessment tools. We know that some parts of the platform can be a bit hard to navigate if you don’t often work in the world of spatial data and analysis. Feel free to use our ‘Guided Walkthrough’ from the welcome screen to run you through the process of requesting your first computation. A separate tutorial video is also being worked upon and will be published in due course.
We are looking for two types of collaborators for CAN: partners to help us develop content, and users to raise awareness.
Partners for content development: To continuously refine and expand our assessment tools, we collaborate with communities of practice like non-government organisations, citizens initiatives, or city administrations who have specific use cases about climate action initiatives and/or deep local knowledge that would impact the indicators. We also welcome cooperation with other research institutions interested in contributing to the scientific foundation of our tools. The only requirement is that everything we build together remains open source and based on open data.
Users & Multipliers: Even if you don’t have the capacity or knowledge to co-develop tools, we are still interested in working with you. We’re happy to connect with individuals and organizations who use our tools to support local climate action, or who help raise awareness by sharing and promoting the tools.
We work closely with our partners, such as LUDI, Radlobby, or WWF, to ensure that our indicators support the climate action initiatives that they are working on every day. By working with partners who use our indicators to help them make more informed decisions, we are confident that these indicators are also helpful to other decision-makers.
We rely on a range of data sources across our assessment tools, from official administrative data to satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap (OSM). Our focus is not on collecting data, but on producing insights. It is therefore important for us to understand the data structure and nuances, and to communicate the uncertainties and limitations clearly. We take great care to be transparent about the uncertainties in both our data sources and our methodologies.
Each of our assessment tools relies on a different combination of data sources. The frequency with which the data is updated depends on both the original datasets’ update frequencies and our methodology design choices. For datasets like OSM, that are updated constantly, we have to balance the benefits of using the latest data against the benefits of caching results to reduce computational load. Detailed information about the update frequency for each assessment tool should be found in the respective methodologies.
Local knowledge is essential to enhance the accuracy of the results. hiBike and hiWalk primarily rely on OpenStreetMap (OSM), a crowdsourced spatial database that owes its existence to local knowledge and community contributions. In many parts of the world, the detailed OSM information we use in our indicators is sparse, so the more locals with first-hand knowledge of the situation on-the-ground can contribute the OSM, the more we can collectively fill in those data gaps.
Not yet, but we are working on adding greenness and air quality (informed by traffic volume estimates) indicators in the future.
Yes, hiWalk includes an optional greenness indicator, which uses the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to provide a score indicating how much vegetation there is around pedestrian infrastructure. Shaded paths aren’t directly included in hiWalk at this stage, although a high greenness score could coincide with shaded paths.
Our goal is to expand these tools to other countries, especially if we have partners with concrete needs for such data. As long as there are publicly available datasets, expanding our estimates to other regions would be straightforward.
Free geoinformation, methods and software for the benefit of the environment and society.
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Background imagery created with data from OpenStreetMap contributors