“Caring is sharing” is a phrase the Wikirate team is fond of using to encourage organizations to ‘open up’ their data.
This time, we’re happy to say that the Wikirate community is doing the sharing, feeding data via API to a climate accounting platform OpenClimate.
OpenClimate compiles climate actions from state and non-state actors — including companies — into one database. The project tackles an inherent emissions monitoring problem: different sectors use different emission accounting systems, fragmenting the data and making it time-consuming and costly to analyze.
OpenClimate simplifies tracking progress, or lack of it, towards reduced emission targets set by the Paris Agreement but instead of just focusing on national actors, it operates to provide information from subnational actors (cities, states, provinces). The platform brings together and presents emissions data from different sources in one place. Users can easily navigate and compare emissions data at different levels by different actors. To generate this overview the platform draws on many data sources — one of these is now Wikirate.
Wikirate is feeding thousands of crowd-researched corporate emissions data points to OpenClimate. The emissions data ranges from greenhouse gasses to nitrous oxide emissions. All the data is fed in by application programming interface (API) — a seamless way to transfer data in bulk quickly.
Wikirate makes all of its data available via API because it fulfills two objectives at once. One, it provides data to projects like OpenClimate. Two, it’s the most effective way of sharing data collected and verified by the community. Consider this: In 2022 the total number of API calls retrieving data from Wikirate was 700 times higher than visits to individual webpages. That’s equivalent to comparing an average sized mouse with three full length blue whales.
Lastly, and most importantly, Wikirate shares data that the community has collected and verified for free because we want to empower better decision making. And that’s exactly what we hope the users of OpenClimate can do with the right information at their fingertips.
Interest in learning how your organization can connect with Wikirate? Get in touch — we’d love to hear from you.
