Dougal Watt loves sorting unstructured data (or messy data as the average person would call it) and he’s made an international career from doing it, with government, banks and some of the biggest companies in the world as his clients. And there’s nothing more messy than climate data, with information of mixed quality drawn from a wide variety of sources, some of it in numbers, others in words, diagrams and photos, and all of it time-bound and changing.
“Collecting this new data set is a complex task for sustainability managers,” says Watt.
“In a big organisation like a government or a corporation there will be millions of data points, all in different formats, from thousands of different sources and changing in real time. And once you have it, you still need to know what to do with it.”
It’s just the sort of challenge the former chief technologist at IBM loves. Together with his partner Sarah Sutherland, Watt has created ClimateTracker, a platform for managing climate-related financial disclosures. By enabling real-time, evidence-based reporting, ClimateTracker helps organisations transparently track their progress towards sustainability goals, setting a new standard in financial and climate reporting.
ClimateTracker is designed as a software-as-a-service and is available on Amazon Web Services.
“There are already other tools for carbon accounting and they’re great, but we think we’ve created a world first, because ultimately you have a different problem with climate data that keeps changing with changing regulations.”
What makes it so world leading?
First there’s the software. ClimateTracker uses patent-pending tech known as semantic declarative generation, a type of symbolic AI that uses data models (rather than large language models) to deal with messy data.
“This allows us to rapidly design and build climate-related solutions at a fraction of the cost of traditional technologies, and update our software within hours or days as standards change,” says Watt.
“In addition, one of the largest setbacks for governments and scientists is that they don’t have quick, affordable ways to analyse climate data in real time - ClimateTracker has technology to make this possible.”
Second, the software is designed to meet the global climate-related financial disclosures, unique in each jurisdiction, such as New Zealand’s CS-1, 2 and 3, Singapore uses IFRS and Australia’s ASRS. ClimateTracker is licensed with IFRS for their SASB standards and has products for all three jurisdictions.
“Every country is developing its own version of these disclosures, so we need to provide tools for each market. The underlying tech is tuned to provide standards-based, evidence-based, auditable climate disclosures that can measure the actual changes of organisational behaviour in real time. That’s a world first.”
The third benefit is the translation of data into actionable recommendations.
“Once you’ve got the data in a manageable form, the question is ‘now what do we do?’. Right now, sustainability managers are working hard to audit the problem. They need to know how to reduce emissions effectively. Our software prioritises the actions. The biggest ‘bang for buck’ if you like.”
The software has detailed dashboards so that C suite and directors have visibility on progress in real time.
Dougal and Sarah have high hopes for a global business.
“Climate change is humanity’s biggest challenge - it’s urgent and it’s global. We need every tool available to accelerate the reduction of GHGs and shift to a fossil free economy. ClimateTracker will be a part of that mission.”