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Building an Evidence Base of Global Climate Policy Global Stocktake Documents as a Knowledge Graph

Kalyan Dutia - Principal Data Scientist, Climate Policy Radar CIC

June 2023

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The UNFCCC Global Stocktake

Assessing global progress towards achieving the goals set out in the Paris Agreement: limiting global temperature rises to well below 2º above pre-industrial levels, and pursuing efforts to limit this rise to 1.5ºC.

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1,600 documents from over 200 authors - both national governments and non-governments

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Involves the analysis of 170,000 pages across a wide range of policy areas

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Kicked off 2 weeks ago at UNFCCC conference in Bonn, Germany. Concludes at COP 28.

Screenshot of UNFCCC Global Stocktake submissions portal (https://unfccc.int/topics/global-stocktake/information-portal)

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Building a policy evidence base as a knowledge graph

Deforestation and forest degradation have contributed to reduced electricity generation. Siltation and water weeds blockages reduce the water flow in the river resulting into high cost of electricity generation. As a result power cuts and fluctuating power levels are a major problem. Forest degradation affects livelihoods, especially that of women and children. Women and children spend more time searching for firewood and forest foods.

(Malawi Third National Communication, 2021)

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DEFORESTATION – GENERAL

DEFORESTATION –�DEGRADATION

DEFORESTATION - �DEGRADATION

POWER GENERATION

CLIM. RELATED HAZARDS –�INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE

VULN. GROUPS –�WOMEN

VULN. GROUPS –�CHILDREN

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Building a policy evidence base as a knowledge graph

taxonomy (20x)

entity type (98x)�= real-world “thing”

= wikipedia page

Lots of taxonomies -> many span classifiers needed in 2 months!

Created tool for policy experts to parametrise their own NLP pipelines with linguistic rules via spreadsheets

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Enabling domain experts to build NLP pipelines

Allows later linking to knowledge base e.g. Wikipedia/Wikidata

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User Interface

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Screenshot of tool at gst1.org showing paragraphs of Global Stocktake submissions mentioning financing of technologies which aid with climate mitigation

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Well-received by countries’ negotiators and the UNFCCC: pilot project proves value of a KG as an evidence base and this tooling to navigate it.

Future work

Other data sources

  • Apply the same pipeline to our database of global climate laws and policies

Open data

  • Open-source taxonomies for review and contribution
  • Release KG as open data

Expanding and improving KG

  • Improve classifier performance: rules to ML
  • Add author properties to knowledge graph (government and non-government)
  • Network analyses to find relations and groups between policy areas?

Findings & Future work

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Collaborations

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  • UIs for research using knowledge graphs
  • Bias in information extraction
  • Combining search and information extraction
  • Network analysis to analyse policies
  • Connecting with other datasets ��

gst1.org | climatepolicyradar.org | twitter.com/climatepolradar

twitter.com/kdutia | https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalyandutia/

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