Hidden in a rough industrial quarter, in the outskirts of Frankfurt (Germany), a young group of innovative and determined people are working towards ensuring economic activities thrive in cooperation with nature, and not at the expense of it. Concretely, they measure the contribution of a company to global warming and in how far its climate strategy is in line with the <2°C-target.
This group of people – united under the umbrella of the company right. based on science – sees the huge potential that scientific information on natural systems has for helping companies set strategies that bear connections to the nature they are trying to protect.
The young company, led by Hannah and Sebastian, was born as a response and understanding of the urgent need for meaningful responses to the climate crisis. They understood that the most effective way for doing so, was to show companies what their specific contribution to climate change looked like.
For some time now, companies have set environmental targets and show some concern towards keeping natural systems under manageable limits. These targets usually fail to take information on natural systems into account and usually do not include individual contributions to the problem, thus drastically reducing the effectiveness of such responses. Partly due to the fact, that no specific threshold to reference their contributions, at least to climate change, had been established.
After the Paris Climate Agreement, this changed. The Agreement provided a clear threshold, the 2°C target. This targeted consensus on keeping global temperatures under 2°C represents a great advance, since it provides a quantifiable and measurable target for individual actors to measure their strategies against.
right. saw this opportunity and took it by the horns. The young company understood that if this target could be put into context for individual companies, they would be more prone and willing to set themselves relevant targets. And that is how their proprietary X-Degree Compatibility (XDC) Model was born.
The XDC Model is a science-based method, which measures an economic entity’s (e.g. a company´s) contribution to global warming by expressing by how many °C the earth would warm up to by 2050, if all economic entities were as emission-intensive as the economic entity in question. By calculating their XDC, companies can measure their contribution against the 2°C target and determine what amount of global warming they want to contribute to.
Understanding the complexity of the challenge, the team of right. sees that the only way for the corporate and financial world has for generating a response is by collaborating with a range of experts from diverse disciplines and making information transparent and widely available. For this reason, right. decided to make the code upon which their XDC Model is based on, available for everyone. They intend to do so, upon the conclusion of their next project, right.open.
right.open is a project which seeks to make climate risks tangible and accessible to a range of actors. The project is – in its first step – primarily addressed to academic actors, such as scientists, researchers and students who will recieve access to the XDC Model and will also be adviced and supported in incorporating the XDC Model´s functionalities into their work.
The intention of the project, before making the code available, is to get academic actors from a range of disciplines using the XDC Model for their work and by this provide information to corporate and financial actors that will allow them to internalize the costs, risks and opportunities posed by climate change into their strategic decisions.
right.open will officially start on May 23rd, with a kick-off event that will take place in Frankfurt and is intended to last for 1.5 years. During this time, live events, webinars, an interactive forum and podcasts will take place, allowing academic actors to make use of the XDC Model. With the overarching intention of making scientific information accessible, available and translatable for economic actors.
right. sees the added value that multidisciplinary research and diverse perspectives can bring for designing relevant and effective climate solutions and is therefore pleased to invite scientists, researchers and students who are keen on sharing their knowledge and experience. A multitude of actors using one single model – the XDC Model – to produce coherent and interrelated results, will guarantee the uptake of science-based method for designing effective climate strategies. As we know by now, if responses to climate change are to be effective, scientific information needs to be at the heart of such solutions.
- If you are interested in getting more information about right.open, please visit the link: https://right-open.com/
- If on the other hand, you would like to understand the project a bit more, please sing up to our introductory webinar: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/right-open-introductory
- If on the other hand, you are already sure you want to participate in right.open, please sing in to our kick-off event: https://rightopenevent.splashthat.com/
For general questions or comments, please contact: info@right-basedonscience.de
