Blog

Motivation

Sustainable Public Procurement involves significant complexity and implementation barriers as it involves diverse categories of products and services, each with their own specific sustainability and knowledge requirements. It also requires augmented organizational capacities to handle expanded information flows that provide more holistic views on market capabilities and supply chain inter-dependencies.

Motivation

GPP is defined as a process whereby public authorities seek to procure goods, services and works with a reduced environmental impact throughout their life-cycle when compared to goods, services and works with the same primary function that would otherwise be procured. Unpacking that definition helps pin down many important characteristics of the information gathering and processing that must take place to support this major sustainability transition process. A most striking high-level aspect is the vast scope of this process: With public procurement forming anywhere from 10% to 30% of an economy, there is vast variability in underlying economic activities, environmental impacts, market characteristics and procurement procedures. Nevertheless, the definition of GPP demands a certain degree of coherency across this vast domain, not least to ensure the cost and energy of public resources dedicated to GPP are effective in achieving their target.

Motivation

The public sector avails of significant purchasing power when contracting with the private sector for goods, works and services. This provides it with meaningful leverage across a good fraction of economic activity. Significant efforts are underway worldwide to utilize this leverage towards achieving sustainability goals. Yet implementing sustainable procurement at scale remains a task of enormous complexity that requires significant investment in different areas: in developing suitable policies, in establishing appropriate information flows and methodologies and, not least, in embedding these new practices and behaviors across swathes of economic activity.

In this blog post we provide a brief overview of how an important class of economic analysis tools termed EEIO, or environmentally extended input-output frameworks, can be utilized to support the implementation of key public procurement sustainability objectives. We sketch the nature of these tools, how they can be used to provide relevant information, and the pros and cons of such an approach.

What are the UN Open Source Principles?

The UN Open Source Principles is a set of eight high-level guiding principles that were recently adopted by the UN Chief Executive Board’s Digital Technology Network (DTN). They open a new window and provide guidelines to drive collaboration and Open Source adoption within the UN and globally. They send a strong signal of the importance of open source and how individuals and organisations need to act to benefit but also support a thriving and sustainable open source community.

Summary

There are dozens upon dozes of indices that aim to measure concentration risk (and related concepts such as diversity or inequality). Why such a proliferation of alternatives? There are multiple reasons, which we will attempt to identify in this post. This enumeration prompts us to dig deeper into the nature of concentration indices and their various pros and cons.

Summary

We imagine the random propagation of money flows through simplified economic networks as a sequence of monetary transactions following a stochastic process. We follow the journey of a cash amount. Whenever a transaction in this chain implies an environmental impact, that impact is recorded and cumulated. Computing the expected outcome of such flows reproduces the standard results of environmentally extended input-output models. The random walk interpretation allows the computation of various additional statistical properties, one example being estimating a variance of environmental impact or intrinsic uncertainty around the central estimate. We interpret this uncertainty as being a concentration risk measure.

Expanding on the popular Input-Output Models with Python course

The SFI32064 course is a DeepDive with nine segments, exploring Input-Output models using Python and the Pymrio library. The following is an updated overview of it contents.

TailRisk Library Release

tailRisk is a C++ library for the calculation of various tail risk measures. Tail Risk is a core concept in Quantitative Risk Management , relevant in particular in Market Risk and Credit Risk Management. Tail Risk is both an informal term denoting unusually occurring tail events and a more precise term denoting concrete classes of risk measures

The Open Risk Manual is now available also as an Android App

The Open Risk Manual is an open online repository of information (wiki) about risk management in all its forms. The Manual is developed and maintained by Open Risk. Our objective is to create a comprehensive, detailed, authoritative collection of risk management resources that are easily accessible by anybody, anywhere - well, network access is currently required!

Recap of Part 1 of the Matrix-to-JSON Post Series

In the first installment of this series, Part 1 we discussed the motivation behind representing and serializing matrices as JSON objects. We defined relevant concepts and in particular the concept of unrolling the matrix into a one-dimensional array and the notion of Column and Row Major orders. We outlined some use cases of interest and initiated a benchmarking exercise that looks into various R and Python JSON serialization utilities (available at the matrix2json repository).

Who Needs a New Financial Services Taxonomy?

Our age is increasingly dominated by the dual challenges and opportunities of the sustainability transition on the one hand, and digital transformation on the other. We witness emerging new financial domains with novel names such as Fintech , or TechFin, or various combinations and hues of Green and Sustainable in Sustainable Finance and we see forces that are reshaping the direction of travel for the financial industry.

What are ActivityPub Networks?

ActivityPub is a technical specification towards decentralized (more precisely, federated) social networking (termed the Fediverse) based upon the exchange of ActivityStreams messages that follow the Activity Vocabulary. The ActivityPub proposal has been standardized and published by the W3C and has motivated the design of several federated social networking systems.

Course Objective

The objective of the course is to provide an introduction to using Eigen::Tensor as a high-level library for using Tensors in C++ projects.

An Awesome List for Sustainable Finance.

A curated list of sustainable finance resources. The focus of the list is on code (tools, libraries, frameworks etc.) that fairly directly support any type of sustainable finance effort and open data that are useful in a sustainable finance context.

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.

June 21 2023 marks the sixth annual #ShowYourStripes Day - a time when meteorologists and other climate communicators around the world raise awareness of our warming planet by displaying colorful visuals of climate change. The warming stripe graphics are representations of the change in temperature over the past 100+ years (here we use the global average). Each stripe represents the temperature averaged over a year. The stripes typically start around the year 1900 and finish in 2022.

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.

Course Objective

Digging into the meaning of credit data collections, the logic that binds them together towards understanding what they can be used for and what limitations and issues they may be affected by, this new course in the Credit Portfolio Management category explores a new angle to look at an old practice.

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.

Integrated Energy Accounting is keeping track and reporting on an entity’s detailed energy footprint (primary inputs, transformations and waste generation) not as an addendum to financial accounting and reporting but as a deeply-linked extension that is subject to the same level of rigor.