King of Prussia-Based Qlik at the Forefront of Global Efforts to Combat Climate Change

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Since 2019, Qlik has been a close partner of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This is the slightly portentous title of the UN secretariat — also referred to as UN Climate Change — that leads global efforts to combat climate change. Qlik has previously supported the UNFCCC’s work by providing licenses to its Qlik Cloud technology and through capacity building.

The recent climate conference, COP26, was held in Glasgow, where representatives from nearly 200 countries — or Parties, as they are formally called in the intergovernmental deliberation process — met to assume new collective commitments to address the impending threat posed by climate change. It benefitted from Qlik’s technical support.

Qlik and others talk frequently about “digital transformation” and the “power of data.” Our work with the UNFCCC exemplifies both, and we are proud to have played a role in the successful event.

During the months leading up to the Glasgow conference, Qlik assisted the UN Climate Change secretariat in creating an innovative IT tool, the Negotiations Status Snapshot (or NESS, for short). The aim of this new platform was to collect and process detailed, up-to-the-minute information on the positions of all the different Parties regarding each issue under discussion, as well as on their subsequent evolution throughout the two-week conference, as consensus was gradually built in the negotiating sessions.

The NESS platform was developed as a pilot project. It was intended as an exploration of new ways to address three crucial needs of data processing at UN Climate Change, as it follows a very complex and intricate negotiations process: firstly, the accuracy of the information collected daily, which calls for both clarity and thoroughness; secondly, the timeliness at which information can be recorded and shared with relevant staff; and thirdly, the possibility of using that information to generate new analytical products that allow for more focused and relevant support in the negotiations process.

The new platform proved to be a valuable tool. During the meeting in Glasgow, NESS was able to collect, process and make available to UNFCCC staff more information, and to do so more speedily, than at previous conferences. This data collection provided the basis for the preparation of daily summaries on the progress of negotiations that were much appreciated by senior staff.

In addition to facilitating the use of Qlik Cloud, I, along with a developer on my team, Grant Larscheid, had the opportunity to work on site, assisting UNFCCC staff in the development of new analytics products, including a function to track progress on different key issues under negotiation and a tool to visualize the relative positions of countries or groups of countries.

The preliminary assessment of this pilot project at UN Climate Change has been positive. A more detailed analysis of its results is currently underway, and it is expected that this initiative will continue to develop in the coming months. Everything points to another year of fruitful collaboration between Qlik and the UNFCCC to develop solutions to address climate change.

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Julie Kae is the Vice President of Sustainability and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) at Qlik, as well as the Executive Director of Qlik.org, the company’s corporate responsibility platform. She brings a collaborative focus to environmental programs and the inclusion and well-being of people everywhere.

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