The Earth Institute, Columbia University is pleased to announce that Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors (DBCCA) of Deutsche Asset Management will continue work with Columbia Climate Center (CCC) researchers to update and enhance their Global Climate Change Policy Tracker. The Policy Tracker is a computer model that estimates the impact of policies on greenhouse gas emissions in various countries across the globe. The tracker includes a comprehensive body of climate change targets and regulations from country governments. The objective of the Policy Tracker is to collect existing targets and evaluate their effectiveness in reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels.
In March 2010, the Policy Tracker was included in an initial report that was produced by DBCCA to reflect policies between October 2009 and January 2010, including pledges announced in the run-up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP 15), as well as new voluntary commitments undertaken by Parties in association with the Copenhagen Accord.
Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors and the Columbia Climate Center’s continued partnership will create a new model with significant structural improvements for greater efficiency and accuracy. The new model will have a modular design to enable easy access to updated versions of energy information as they become available. Policies will be stored in a database that identifies them according to their category and application, which in turn correspond to functions programmed into the model. Creating this simple, yet information-rich, database will make it easy to add new policies as they are proposed, and will expand the user’s ability to alter underlying assumptions, include new categories of policy, and otherwise create a more flexible and robust platform for estimating impacts of policies on greenhouse gas emissions.
The DBCCA and CCC teams will continue to work very closely together to make these vital improvements to the Policy Tracker and Emissions Model, which will now serve researchers and policy leaders even more effectively. While the emissions projections are sobering, the potential for new tools to help the global community navigate the needs of climate change policies world-wide is widening thanks to these types of partnerships. The Earth Institute is grateful and excited to continue this work.
