Picture a tree. It needs sun, water, nitrogen and phosphorus to survive. Eliminate even one of the four and it flounders. Efforts to withstand climate change aren’t much different. To be successful, they, too, have a list of boxes that must be checked — things like biodiversity, disaster preparedness, sea-level rise and renewable energy.
So argues data scientist and ecologist Eric Berlow. Visualizing the “critical needs” of climate change mitigation will help highlight areas that need more financial support, he says.
Berlow runs Vibrant Data Labs, a social impact data science group that gathers and helps visualize climate funding data to make its impacts more transparent. Guiding the organization’s work like a compass is its open-source tool known as the Climate Finance Tracker (CFT), which tracks the flow of money to climate mitigation and resilience efforts on the ground. The tool highlights not only where funding is going, but also where it’s absent.
The premise is simple: When everybody can see where the money is going and where it’s lacking, resources can be divided more strategically.
Embracing Complexity
The CFT sprouted from Berlow’s longtime mission to clarify the difference between complex and complicated.
“A well-crafted baguette fresh out of the oven is complex, but a curry onion green olive poppy cheese bread is complicated,” he said in his 2010 TED talk, “Simplifying Complexity.”
Berlow argues that humankind should not be intimidated by complexity because wrangling it can help it address existential problems like climate change. To remove the fear factor from complexity, he leans on his training as an ecologist. His doctoral work at Oregon State University focused on ecological complexity and his postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, studied the ecology of mountain ecosystems in the Sierra Nevada.
The interconnectedness of species is a topic that surfaces repeatedly in the field of ecology, and that web is … well, complex. Studying that complexity yields numerous insights that can be as relevant to complex human problems as they are to complex problems in nature, Berlow said.
One such insight is that visualization helps untangle complexity and encourages you to ask questions you didn’t previously think to ask. Another is that the more you embrace complexity, the better your chances are of finding simple answers. In ecology, for example, scientists who want to predict the effect of one species on another must zoom out; if you zero in on only that one relationship, you might miss the forest for the trees.
Nature is noisy and the related field data is messy. As a result, relationships are multi-causal and complex. A self-proclaimed data ecologist, Berlow knows how to find meaningful signals in the data noise. Being an ecologist helps him make informed inferences in a complex system, he said.
Although the ecologist’s toolbox can help solve all sorts of problems, Berlow has decided that the best use for his superpower — simplifying data from complex webs and noisy signals — is addressing climate change.
How the Climate Finance Tracker Helps
The problems with climate change are not limited to noisy signals and complex interdependencies alone. There’s also a glaring urgency of time, which means benefactors need to maximize their impact — and quickly.
Funders are under pressure to make good decisions, but many just follow the herd and throw money into spaces that are already well-funded, according to Berlow.
“My worry is that a lot of money might be wasted if we don’t really use data to help guide some of those decisions so everybody needs the big picture,” he said in 2023 at Summit At Sea, an annual gathering of multidisciplinary luminaries who assemble for a seafaring program of speakers, workshops, performances, adventures and networking opportunities.
Vibrant Data Labs’ open-source CFT tool provides that big picture. Like the aforementioned tree that has multiple critical needs, climate issues that must be addressed run the gamut from renewable energy to protecting biodiversity, reforming food and agriculture, and addressing resilience in natural disasters, to name just a few. The CFT maps which of these verticals is receiving funding, which helps funders visualize where resource gaps exist so they can direct subsequent funding streams at the most pressing needs instead of simply retreading already worn ground.
Real-world success stories for CFT implementation abound. One, for example, is a collaboration with Elemental Excelerator, a nonprofit investor in climate technologies. Vibrant Data Labs confirmed Elemental’s thesis that nascent climate tech companies who had received an early grant or loan were more likely to survive. The finding has helped catalyze more climate tech funding from non-traditional sources, Berlow said in a 2024 interview with 11VEN, an innovation collective focused on advancing solutions for sustainable cities.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence
Being data scientists, the team at Vibrant Data Labs understands that AI’s use need not be restricted to a “black box that spits out an answer,” Berlow told 11VEN. Beyond the hype, the technology can help address climate change in very real ways, he noted.
Case in point: using machine learning to achieve the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDG).
“Everyone talks about the SDGs at the highest level, and yet what’s interesting to me are the [hundreds of] targets within them,” Berlow said. Breaking goals into more granular targets helps direct funds and reveals where an individual investment fits into the larger context, he explained. Although manually classifying grants and investments to these targets can be painful for humans to do, it’s a task machine learning can execute quite easily, he added.
AI’s concept-matching capabilities that come into play in recommendation engines can also help match grants and investments to the solution they’re best equipped to solve.
Berlow is hopeful about the future because he sees that the intersection between data and climate is not terribly complicated.
“We know what needs to be done. We have a simple way to always have a pulse on where the money is flowing, where it is not going, where it is needed and then understand where the gaps are. It’s doable,” he told 11VEN.
He believes there’s no time to waste.
“We have to solve the climate crisis on the first try,” Berlow stressed.
Poornima Apte is a trained engineer turned technology writer. Her specialties include engineering, AI, IoT, automation, robotics, climate tech and cybersecurity. Poornima's original reporting on Indian Americans moving to India in the wake of the country's economic boom won her an award from the South Asian Journalists’ Association. Poornima is a proud member of the Cloud (the sky, not the tech kind) Appreciation Society. Find her at wordcumulus.com.
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