PROVIDING INSIGHT

Many of the most pressing environmental challenges we face are hard to understand or are obscured by bias. Environmental Capital Group is partnering with Novim, a nonprofit corporation based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to take on the difficult job of simplifying environmental problems, providing insight without advocacy, and developing strategies to communicate the results broadly.

Like ECG, Novim is a pioneering organization that excels at recognizing and solving important problems that others have missed or deemed unsolvable. Recently, Novim's Global Surface Temperature project released a transparent, easily accessible database that merges and normalizes all of the major global surface temperature data going back to 1800. A unique, portable application allows researchers and the public at large graphical access to this powerful temperature data set.

Novim and ECG are now developing a transparent platform for evaluating pathways to reduce carbon emissions: Carbon Levers. Over the next few decades, trillions of dollars will be invested to upgrade and expand the energy capacity of the world's economies. Despite all of the sophisticated climate models that have been developed, there remains a great need to clearly articulate the key problems and available investment levers in an understandable way.

An easy to use interactive tool is needed to help guide policymakers, investors, NGOs, planners, and ordinary citizens in taking into account the priorities and trade-offs country-by-country and project-by-project. Remarkably, this has never been done, and international leaders such as our advisors Lord Nicholas Stern and professor Robert Socolow agree that - unfortunately - experts have done a poor job of communicating the underlying message. The model will allow users to understand the material carbon emitters, the solutions to reducing emissions, and the investment levels required to generate those reductions.