After an 18-month industry consultation, we opened Icebreaker One at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York.
Our focus is on bridging the gaps between finance, policy and climate — unlocking a data marketplace that will help better inform large-scale financial decisions to minimise their carbon and environmental impact. We are convening people from across the public and private sectors to develop of shared principles and practice that could lead to open standards that would enable relevant and timely information to be shared.
Our ability to join up and use existing and emerging data to address our environmental crises is stifled. The inhibitor to innovation is not technology— it is culture. Asset owners, funders and insurers are complex value chains today: not working with data at-scale due to high transaction costs.
“We are limiting our creativity in finding new models, products and market solutions.”
We have an ocean of available capital. Lack of good data-flow is leading to misallocation of resources, missed opportunities and catastrophic risks on our global balance sheets. Broad digital transformation is reaching maturity across industries—now is the time to build in new uses for the data. If we solve this for climate change, we will unlock solutions for other areas.
We are delighted to announce support from our founder members. These include UN Environment, Arup, Willis Towers Watson, AON, Bird & Bird, Blue Ventures, Cenfri and many others. We are documenting their use-cases here and others (including more international use-cases) over the coming months.
We are also working across two UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to help shape the future of both Open Finance (data interoperability across the entire financial services sector from insurance to pensions) and Climate Finance Innovation (unlocking the potential for new financial products and services that address climate change).
If you would like to get involved, please Join Us.
Making data work harder to create innovative financial products and services
Feedback from several hundred organisations has crystalised on three outcomes which would be of benefit to the private and public sectors.
- An open standard
Robust and secure data sharing across environmental & financial data (cf. Open Banking) - An impact accelerator
Increase the speed-to-market of new financial and technical products and services - An accreditation & certification services
Ensure development of a robust data marketplace
Areas of focus
- Address the business models, legal and policy (e.g. rights, licensing, security, liability, regulation) of data sharing
- Improve the provision, reliability and trust of data publishing
- Develop policy frameworks that address climate-specific interventions across the financial ecosystem
- Unlock the data ecosystem across global sensors, satellites, internet of things (IoT), geospatial, asset registries, risk reporting, trading schemes and financial instruments
- Enable data discovery (e.g. search) at web-scale: lay the foundations for the web of environmental data
Over the remainder of 2019 we will be narrowing our focus to pick our first test candidates. Options currently include: shipping, agriculture, aviation, water, energy infrastructure.