Bluewave and Salesforce Shortlisted for Dublin’s Open Data Climate Action Challenge

Read about the citizen-facing platform we built, with the help of Salesforce’s Tableau technology.

In 2021, Ireland committed to a 51% reduction of carbon emissions by 2030 – a huge target that the EPA said would be difficult to reach, even with ambitious stretch measures in place. In order to get there, every Irish citizen, business, and institution has a critical role to play. 

In this context, Bluewave team of experts joined forces with Salesforce to utilise the tools and skills available in our respective companies to meet the challenge of the Dublin Region Climate Action Open Data Challenge 2022. Our plan to meet this challenge involved leveraging open data to boost and support people and institutions in their climate action – something that every citizen of Dublin could easily get involved in.

About the Climate Action Challenge

The Dublin Region Climate Action Challenge is a call out to businesses and innovators to use open data to drive and support climate action by creating groundbreaking applications. As part of the competition, participants get an opportunity to showcase their work, achieve recognition, attain prizes and help drive climate action in Dublin and beyond. Entry to this challenge is open to individuals and groups of all ages and backgrounds, with many forward-thinking organisations answering the call and developing solutions.

We’re are very proud that we’ve been shortlisted for the work we’ve done so far, and are submitting today our Project Report to the panel for assessment. We will then present our project to the panel over the next two weeks. It has been a wonderful experience for the Bluewave and Salesforce teams, utilising our respective skill set to produce a publicly available resource that anyone can access and use.

Working Together

This experience, and the progress made during this project, would not have been possible without the support and guidance from the following people and organisations. Firstly, we’d like to thank Luke Binns at Smart Dublin – the organisation hosting the competition – for your expertise, support, and enthusiasm for the work we’ve produced. Our thanks also go out to the Codema team: John O’Shea, Rebecca Cacchia, Ciaran Murphy, and Eoin Ahern, as well as to Katharine Cooney of Derilinx, Darby Mullen – Climate Action Officer at South Dublin County Council, Marti and Magda of the GoZeroWaste app, and also the climate action, data analytics, and business intelligence experts at Northumberland County Council: Nick Johnston, Harri Bellizzi, and Katie Thirlwell. We’d also like to show our appreciation to our partners at Salesforce, particularly Manuela Suarez, John Stobie, and Diana Carter – who we worked in close collaboration with throughout the project.

“Bluewave are delighted to have been shortlisted with Salesforce for the Dublin Region Climate Action Open Data Challenge 2022. Our team has worked hard to deliver our citizen calculator built on Salesforce Technology, utilising Open Data with a view to finding interactive ways to encourage citizens to adopt behaviour change to meet Ireland’s Carbon Emission targets for 2030. I’d like to thank our partners at Salesforce for working closely with us on this innovative build, as well as our other collaborators for their support throughout the project.” – Finian Quinn: Net Zero Practice Lead, Bluewave

Our Project Submission

Our project addresses the energy, building and transport themes laid out in the Dublin Climate Change Action Plans, defined by the four local authorities in the Dublin region. Our goal is to use open data to increase engagement of citizens and businesses in climate action by encouraging them to reduce energy consumption, adopt active travel, and other climate-friendly activities. This work led to the development of an interactive energy use and carbon footprint calculator to be published on Tableau’s Public Interface.

The calculator is now freely accessible to all and you can find it here. 

This calculator integrates open data into a narrative infographic to help citizens make sense of what can often seem like a vast and intimidatingly complex topic. The calculator allows users to visualise a projected future Carbon Footprint for Dublin, view the carbon footprint for their particular area code, and see how changing their energy consumption can help Dublin reach its 2030 carbon emissions reduction target.

What If?

The calculator that we designed has a user interface that includes an interactive map of the Dublin region, a graph showing current target based emissions for Dublin, and a “What if“ carbon emissions trajectory for Dublin that changes based on the options that a user selects. The user can select from a whole array of climate-friendly changes they can make to their homes or premises, such as insulating their home, installing a heat pump, and installing solar panels.

Depending on the choices made, users can view the impact this will have in their region, live within the graph. Ultimately, we hope this prototype may prove a useful concept that can be further refined to improve its robustness and serve to support the Climate Action Plans of the four Dublin authorities and any other stakeholders committed to driving accountability and action in the urgent race to Net Zero.

Salesforce-Powered Solutions

In order to bring this project to life, our team utilised Salesforce’s Tableau technology, which is designed to help people see and understand data. As a Platinum Salesforce partner, we had full access to Tableau’s visual analytics platform, which we used to revolutionise the way citizens, businesses, and councils in Dublin could use climate-related data to decrease their emissions. This data-driven approach was supported by a visually appealing dashboards that made the data more accessible to the average user. 

If you’d like to know more about how our Salesforce-powered solutions can help your organisation get to Net Zero faster, reach out to our Net Zero Practice Lead: Finian Quinn, to discuss how Bluewave and Salesforce can support your department, business or sector in managing your carbon data and how to utilise it to drive behavioural change.

Get in touch with Finian Quinn: finian.quinn@bluewavegroup.eu

What’s Next?

The Open Data Climate Action Challenge’s winner will soon be announced, but in the meantime, we’ll keep you updated on our project build. If you’d like to see the competition winner announced live, register here to secure your place at the Climate Action Challenge’s Showcase Event. This virtual event will showcase all seven of the shortlisted competition entries, as well as a short keynote by Professor John Sweeney – Climatologist and Contributing Author to the 4th Assessment Report which won the Nobel Peace Prize for the IPCC.

Going forward, we’ll also keep you up to date with our other activities to promote climate-action and the responsibility we all have to lower our carbon emissions. We look forward to further collaborating with our partners at Salesforce towards this end, and we thank you for joining us on this journey so far.

If you’d like to know more about how our Salesforce-powered solutions can help your organisation accelerate your path to Net Zero, contact a member of our dedicated team today.