The Climate Dictionary is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) aimed at providing people worldwide with a simplified guide to understand climate change. The Dictionary (first published Aug 2023) seeks to bridge the gap between complex scientific jargon such as present in the IPCC publications and other scientific bodies and the public.
Image: NASA Temperature Anomaly
The Dictionary selects several dozen important climate concepts that are currently actively discussed worldwide with the aim to make them more accessible and relatable to individuals from various backgrounds and levels of expertise.
New data models introduced in this release of Equinox cater to the requirement of integrating energy attribute certificate information into the portfolio database.
GHG Accounting offers a means of measuring the direct and indirect emissions to the Earth’s Biosphere of CO2 and its equivalent gases from industrial and other activities. GHG Accounting is a rapidly developing area that has come to receive increased focus in the context of accelerating Climate Change. Given that the generation of electricity and heat accounts for around a third of global GHG emissions electricity consumers have incentives to proactively reduce those emissions by reducing electricity demand, or by shifting energy supply by procuring alternative lower-carbon or renewable resources.
Equinox Applications This page collects Equinox Application documentation for quick reference.
NOTE: Equinox is still in active development. As the functionality of the platform is enhanced, the documentation will be enriched and updated, following also user feedback.
Equinox Releases This page collects Equinox release information for quick reference.
NOTE: Equinox is still in active development. As the functionality of the platform is enhanced, the documentation will be enriched and updated, following also user feedback.
Solstice is a flexible open source economic network simulator. Its primary outcomes are quantitative analyses of the behavior of economic systems under uncertainty. In this post we provide a first overall description of Solstice to accompany the first public release.
Modeling economic networks and their dynamics Economic networks are the primary abstractions though which we can conceptualize the state (condition) and evolution of economic interactions. This simply reflects the fact that human economies are quite fundamentally systems of interacting actors (or nodes in a network) with transient or more permanent relations between them.
In practice the network character of an economy is frequently suppressed or under-emphasized and does not play a particularly important role.
Release 0.6 Release 0.6 of equinox introduces a second use case with summary national statistics (country / sector), visualizations, fixtures and the adoption of BDD testing framework
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Release 0.5 With Release 0.5 of equinox we start the more formal tracking of developments.
The Equinox alpha release 0.5 includes a complete data set to be used in testing Use Case 1. Use case 1 takes the perspective of local authority (a city) that wants to examine the footprint of its city-wide procurement portfolio
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Equinox is an open source platform that supports holistic risk management and reporting in the context of Sustainable Portfolio Management. The platform integrates geospatial information with applicable regulatory and industry standards, for example the GHG Protocol (accounting for Project based, Corporate and City-Wide greenhouse gas emissions), the IPCC Emissions Factor database and further reference data, the PCAF attribution methodologies (and more) to provide a holistic view of the footprint of both individual projects and portfolios.
The Role of Open Risk Manual Taxonomies A taxonomy is the categorization of concepts. It can be a very useful tool in supporting effective knowledge management. Fundamentally a taxonomy is a scheme of classification, typically a hierarchical classification, in which things or concepts are organized into groups or types of increasing specificity.
Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy is a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. It is sometimes also named a containment hierarchy.
What are Input-Output Models? Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output (EE-MRIO) tables describe economic relationships of economic actors (e.g. industrial sectors) operating within and between regions and their environmental repercussions.
An EE MRIO augments the more basic and historically first proposed Input-Output Models (IO) with additional datasets and/or modeling assumptions in order to provide insights into the environmental foorprint of economic activity. Presently, the emphasis on negative externalities of economic activity (e.g., climate change, biodiversity loss) turns EE MRIO models into a useful conceptual and analytic tool.
In the latest update of the Equinox Project we discuss the integration of reference data an in particular greenhouse gas emissions factors as catalogued in the IPCC Emissions Factors database (EFDB).
Equinox is an open source platform that supports the holistic risk management and reporting of major sustainable finance projects (the financing of projects with material physical footprint) such as project finance.
Equinox aims to integrate in the database a number reference databases that facilitate tasks of sustainable portfolio management. In the current focus such reference material concerns the emissions factors for various processes and activities. In the latest (Solstice Day!) update of the Equinox Project we discuss the integration of reference data an in particular greenhouse gas emissions factors as catalogued in the IPCC Emissions Factors database (EFDB).
Equinox is an open source platform that supports holistic risk management and reporting of Sustainable Finance (Sustainable Portfolio Management). The platform integrates geospatial information with applicable regulatory and industry standards from EBA, PCAF and Equator Principles to provide a holistic view of the footprint of both individual projects and portfolios, in particular of project finance investments.
Motivation Sustainability (understood in environmental, economic and social terms) is emerging as an undisputed constraint that will shape future human activity and more specifically how the financial system facilitates and empowers economic life.
Semantic Web Technologies integrate naturally with the worlds of open data science and open source machine learning, empowering better control and management of the risks and opportunities that come with increased digitization and model use
The ongoing and accelerating digitisation of many aspects of social and economic life means the proliferation of data driven/data intermediated decisions and the reliance on quantitative models of various sorts (going under various hashtags such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science etc.
Celebrating Pi Day 2021 Pi Day is celebrated every year on March 14th. The reason of course is that the day is denoted in some calendars as (3/14), which evokes of 3.14, the first three digits of “π”. A thin excuse maybe but sufficient for the true believers to join along! The occasion represents an annual opportunity for mathematics and science enthusiasts to recite the infinite charms of Pi, including its irrationality, to talk to friends and family about math and its uses, and, when everything else fails, simply eat pie.
Course Content This CrashCourse is an introduction to semantic data using Python. It covers the following topics:
We learn to work with RDF graphs using rdflib We explore the owlready package and OWL ontologies We look into json-ld serialization of RDF/OWL data We try data validation using pySHACL We use throughout a realistic data set based on the Credit Ratings Ontology Who Is This Course For The course is useful to:
The Non-Perfoming Loan Ontology The Non-Performing Loan Ontology is a framework that aims to represent and categorize knowledge about non-performing loans using semantic web information technologies. Codenamed NPLO, it codifies the relationship between the various components of a Non-Performing Loan portfolio dataset.(NB: Non-performing loans are bank loans that are 90 days or more past their repayment date or that are unlikely to be repaid, for example if the borrower is facing financial difficulties).
We introduce a global mobility index that averages Google mobility data across all available countries (weighting by population) to provide an overall view of how the pandemic has influenced human mobility
Constructing a Global Mobility Index (GMI) In previous posts (here, and here) we introduced new Open Risk Dashboard functionalities that integrate COVID-19 community mobility data (currently focusing on the datasets provided by Google).
As a reminder, these reports chart over time human mobility trends collected from mobile geolocation data. The granularity is by geography and across different categories of places / activities such as retail and recreation areas, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential areas.
The Risk Function Ontology The Risk Function Ontology is a framework that aims to represent and categorize knowledge about risk management functions using semantic web information technologies. Codenamed RFO codifies the relationship between the various components of a risk management organization. Individuals, teams or even whole departments tasked with risk management exist in some shape or form in most organizations. The ontology allows the definition of risk management roles in more precise terms, which in turn can be used in a variety of contexts: towards better structured actual job descriptions, more accurate description of internal processes and easier inspection of alignement and consistency with risk taxonomies (See also live version and white paper (OpenRiskWP04_061415)
Sankey diagrams are very useful for the visualization of flows, especially when there is a conserved quantity. They can be tricky when some of the flows are much smaller than others. In the latest release of transitionMatrix we include an example of a log-scale version of Sankey
Using Sankey Diagrams Sankey Diagrams are a type of flow diagram composed of interconnected arrows. The width of the arrows is proportional to the flow rate. Sankey diagrams are often used in physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) and engineering but also in economics. They can be used to represent the relative role and significance of various inputs and outputs in a given process.
Sankey diagrams emphasize the major transfers within a system.
