To advance meaningful climate action, decision-makers need reliable, accessible data about what’s actually working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report from Stanford Law School’s Law and Policy Lab. A central message of the policy practicum team is that trusted, accessible climate performance data isn’t a luxury; it’s a public good and a precondition for increasing investments in effective climate solutions.
The report, Increasing Accessibility to Trusted Climate Performance Data, makes the case that, rather than waiting for top-down mandates, collaboration among corporate, academic, nonprofit, and sub-national government actors is essential to developing investor-grade climate data. It also identifies critical gaps in the availability of trusted, activity-level climate performance data and recommends concrete steps to close them, including launching targeted pilot projects for methane emissions reductions, carbon dioxide removals (CDR), and forest carbon interventions, and applying open data principles to ensure the resulting information is accessible and trustworthy. The policy practicum, Bridging the Climate Data and Decision-Making Divide, was led by David J. Hayes, JD ’78, Stanford professor of the practice, former senior White House climate advisor, and former deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Drawing on examples from the medical and data science fields, the report highlights the power of modern data management tools – remote sensing, artificial intelligence, application programming interfaces, and open-source platforms – to build shared, interoperable climate data systems.
“For some key climate investment opportunities, we’re in a data desert,” Hayes said. “Technologies like remote sensing and AI are generating more data than ever, but without common standards, protocols, or open access data sharing, reliable information on the atmospheric impacts of activity-level investments in some of the most important climate opportunity areas is simply unavailable. We need to build the infrastructure that generates more investor-grade, actionable climate performance information.”
The Law and Policy Lab is Stanford Law School’s hands-on policy clinic, where small, interdisciplinary teams of students work under faculty supervision to conduct intensive, client-focused research. The policy practicum brought together students from across Stanford University, including law, computer science, and business. All came to the project with prior, relevant experience, including in environmental science and climate policy.
Victor Wu, JD ’24, who served as the course’s teaching assistant and is also a legal assistant in Stanford’s Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab), played a key role in guiding the project. “Working on this project showed me how essential legal frameworks are to building trusted data systems,” Wu said. “We can’t scale climate solutions unless we have verifiable, interoperable data that communities, governments, and markets all trust.”
Policy Lab participants helped to organize and stage a major conference at Stanford which informed recommendations included in the report. The conference was sponsored by Stanford Law School’s Environmental and Natural Resources and Law and Policy programs, CodeX, the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s Accelerator, the Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Data Foundation. [See the Data Foundation’s blog post and upcoming webinar]
“Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies 8,180 acres, among the largest in the United States, and enrols over 17,000 students.”
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