Diome
[noun]
A data biome that represents a temporal cluster of data from which specific insights can be learned, analysed and/or derived.

Discussion

This is public on LinkedIn (open gdoc here if you’d like to contribute)

• when training AI, if you have a load of similar diomes you’ll end up with monocultural outcomes.
• in the same way, ‘monoculture’ biomes means you cannot have the degree of biodiversity to sustain a planet, if you don’t have enough diomes you wont be able to represent the richness of our world (natural and human)
• ensure that the diome has as complete a representation of the system as possible, with appropriate granularity, resolution, quality, volume and systems ontology?

Builds on the definition of Biome

“A biome is a biogeographical unit consisting of a biological community that has formed in response to the physical environment in which they are found and a shared regional climate. Biomes may span more than one continent. Biome is a broader term than habitat and can comprise a variety of habitats.”

Three climate actions you can take today.

One of the challenges we all face in addressing climate emergency is “what can I do that would actually make a difference?”

As individuals, we often feel powerless to make a difference (we need to heat our homes, eat, travel, etc. and it’s tough to really reduce our consumption). Surely it’s up to the finance community to direct money to net zero? Yes, but we are not powerless. On my journey over the years, I’ve spoken to many hundreds of people from the most junior to the most senior to politicians.

My one takeaway is that everyone needs ‘permission’ from someone else (their boss, their board, their shareholders, the members of their, their voters). On one level this ‘outsources’ the responsibility to someone else, but it also points to where the influence lies and leads me to think that the biggest financial impact we can all have as individuals is to do the following three things.

Ask your bank, insurer & pension provider

1. What are their net-zero commitments? (and what do they mean)
2. How will they demonstrate them? (progress and success)
3. How is CEO pay tied to net-zero success? (and what happens if they fail)

Updates

This seems to be emerging

https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/norway-fund-gets-tough-on-net-zero-6107074/

https://twitter.com/nesta_uk/status/1600466016915505155

Net Zero Data

Data related to delivering Net Zero impact on our ecosystem.

Our transition to net-zero is underway — how can we ensure it is provable, robust, secure and fair?

via The FT we have

The world’s largest oil traders are rushing to plough billions of dollars into renewable energy projects in the next five years, as they speed up preparations for a dramatic shift in the world’s energy mix. Marco Dunand, chief executive of Swiss commodity trader Mercuria, said the company was investing $1.5bn into projects in North America with private equity partners, while Torbjorn Tornqvist, chief executive of Gunvor, said he planned to commit 10 per cent of the company’s equity — hundreds of millions of dollars — over the next two years. “If you want to exist in 10 years’ time and don’t want to be in renewables then I think it is going to be tough,” Mr Dunand told the FT Commodities Global Summit. “We don’t have a choice” but meet the Paris climate goals, he said, calling it the world’s “biggest challenge”

via Forbes we have

renewables investments in Germany and France yielded returns of 178.2% over a five year period, compared with -20.7% for fossil fuel investments

Now join up with the global (excluding USA, but now including China) consensus on the Paris Accord, and the new financial reporting mechanisms (e.g TCFD) for Central Banks in Europe, and beyond.

And, with Icebreaker One, we are developing a national programme — Open Energy — which along with enabling data sharing, has an explicit, embedded target to help deliver the UK’s legally binding mission to be net-zero.

Open Energy is based on the principles of Open Banking, which is still only just getting started… this piece highlights that

the global open banking market generated $7.29 billion in 2018, and is expected to reach $43.15 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 24.4% from 2019 to 2026.

We hope to unlock similar value and growth by opening up access to energy data across not only the sector itself but by connecting energy data across the rest of the systems that must be decarbonised, including transport, the built environment, water and agriculture.

The time for theory is over. The question is how we will instrument the transition to ensure net-zero is provable, robust, secure and fair.

I’ve been receiving a lot of calls from people asking how they can use data to ‘help’. 

To help frame a potential response that isn’t just ‘we can build an app for that’ (that’s very rarely the answer), I’ve been trying to encourage people to first look at user needs and prior work. In times of ’emergency’ there’s a rush for people to want to ‘do something’— let’s harness that energy on useful things rather than squander it on ‘solutionising’?

Here’s a provocation process to ask how we can try and focus on what matters; that can unlock rapid-response from a frontline delivery team who can focus on solutions. At the same time, let’s also avoid just breaking things in the process, and give the frontline team (and the rest of us) the confidence that there is a process following them that will tidy up.

Questions to consider:

• What problems are we really trying to solve — based on actual user needs?
• How will data help these problems? (what data, what analysis, etc?)
• Who should act to convene and lead: a sector, public body, both?
• When are solutions needed and what might be our MVP intervention? (this may not need any data)
• What single-issue could act as an exemplar?

[click to comment or edit]  (or quick-link to this slide http://bit.ly/data-triage)

In City AM

[Re: Why Open Banking is the next finance revolution]

As co-chair of the original Open Banking Standard, it’s great to see the progress being made — and we fully expect this to extend into Open Finance (spanning insurance, pensions and investments). However, access to data in consumer finance is just the tip of the (fast-melting) iceberg. To respond to the impact of climate change we need to apply lessons learned to business data — to make data-at-scale work harder to deliver innovative financing for a carbon-zero future. With COP26 being held in the UK this year, we have an opportunity to combine our industrial strategy, climate targets and data infrastructure to shape our investment strategies, reveal efficiencies and better understand risk. Sorting out our ‘data plumbing’ will help power world-class analytical capabilities (e.g. artificial intelligence) to help our financial and environmental worlds align.  

Gavin Starks,

Founder, Icebreaker One

Open Banking—is a regulated standard that addresses data sharing across the banking sector. 

It addresses: 

• Rights
• Liability models
• Dispute resolution and redress
• Consent
• Security
• Legal frameworks
• Usability 
• Logistics
• Technology architecture
• Operating principles
• Myriad related issues

Open Banking was created by convening teams to develop common principles and practice for sector-wide data sharing. They included existing and challenger banks, trade bodies, fintechs, Treasury and regulators. In the UK, this led to the creation of an independent non-profit (funded by the banks) to develop and take the standard to market, with a directory of accredited organisations using it. 

The standard was (and is) developed openly—as a result, it has helped to catalyse initiatives around the world.  Similar initiatives now exist across Australia, Bahrain, Europe, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, New Zealand, Rwanda, Singapore and the USA.

This work is being extended to ‘Open Finance’. This would further include Investments, Pensions, Savings, Consumer Credit, Mortgages and General Insurance. 

We are also working on its extension into other sectors such as energy and environment (through IcebreakerOne.org). 

We are working with the UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, to help shape the direction of this work.

After an 18-month industry consultation, we opened Icebreaker One at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York.

–> More information here on the new IcebreakerOne.org website

Between this and Open Banking/Finance, we’re going to be quite busy at Dgen HQ.

We announced of our first open consultation for IcebreakerOne at the UN DRR Global Platform on 13 May 2019.

Development of the Open Environmental Risk Standard continues: this week, we’ve been working on a one-pager to translate what we’re doing in to more simple words. This is a summary of what we’ve come up with so far. If you would like to comment it’s also available as an open Google Doc (shortlink: http://bit.ly/dgen-ib1-001).

Our challenges

Our societies face risks due to extreme weather and events in a changing climate in the $trillions. Combined with rapid industrialisation of new economies and population growth, the impacts are multi-faceted: they will affect lives, infrastructure and assets.

Our capacity to model these increasingly complex, non-linear risks is not keeping pace with the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, and the uncertainties and the pace of our global development. We are also missing opportunities to innovate and create new solutions using the tools we have created over the last 30 years.

Our opportunities

For infrastructure owners, the opportunity is to better prepare for disasters and to have greater transparency of the systemic, nonlinear risks being faced.

For institutional investors, the opportunity is to actively manage risk exposure and to transform potential losses into sustainable returns.

For insurers, the opportunity is to provide new class of insurance combined with market standard risk transparency and openness and to create new investment opportunities.

For policy-makers, the opportunity is to ensure that infrastructure investment contributes to reduced physical risk, to help increase marketplace resilience, and to enable new products and services to emerge.

For National Disaster Management Offices (NDMO), the opportunity is to accurately model and understand the risks faced and to better prepare for, or prevent, the loss of lives, livelihoods and disruption to homes and businesses.

The way forward

We all need a better way of making our money work to keep things safe instead of paying for things once they have broken.

We must act together to protect our citizens, our property, our markets and our businesses.
Our challenge is to ask how might we combine the wealth of nations, machines and humans to unlock the $trillions required to create a resilient, low carbon economy.

In this, the 30th anniversary of the Web, we are in an unprecedented era. We have instrumented the world, connected billions of people, millions of companies and hundreds of countries with the web of data. Learning from open standards, such as the Open Banking Standard, we have the opportunity to create new categories of data portability to underpin open marketplaces.

Our programme, codename Icebreaker One, will combine expertise in policy and business innovation to harness the new tools and infrastructure now available to us, at scale.

Our focus

Icebreaker One will target infrastructure due to its vested interests in resilience, substantial exposure to climate risk, and need to unlock new funding mechanisms. This will enable better decisions to be made and provide better decision-support on the uncertainties faced today.

Based on user needs, we will be defining specific use-cases and actors, ecosystem boundaries and the core data infrastructure within scope. We will ask how the web of data could improve risk modelling for an insurer, what legal, commercial policy and technical frameworks could transform the market: from how to better price resilience to defining new financial instruments to enable pre-investment. The aim is not to produce a situation where we are just insuring the risks.

Based on the transformative power of the web of data (ranging from global geospatial data to self-reporting assets) we will explore and define how data rights, licensing, liability, privacy and security can be addressed to unlock new models, products and services. We will also consider the adverse effects of data.

Our process

Six working groups, working with a core governance group, will feed into the development of joined up frameworks for culture, policy, making, learning, standards and data infrastructure.

The culture group will create compelling narratives for peers, professionals and policy-makers.

The policy group frame the regulatory and legal environment which could support the work, including potential licensing models.

The making group will identify user stories that connect specific problems, stakeholders and data, and identify innovations that could be enabled the standard.

The learning group will explore business models through use cases and direct research.

The standards group will addressing both human and machine standards and how they might interoperate to support collective intelligence.

The data infrastructure group will determine the scope of foundational data to be included and why, taking a view on architecture, interoperability, security, discoverability and usability.

We will publish our draft report in May 2019.

For more details see http://dgen.net/oers