At BBVA Data & Analytics, we strongly believe in the moral obligation of data-driven organizations to share data and contribute to society. Hence, we regularly contribute to sustainable development initiatives as part of our Data for Social Good agenda. For instance, in our economic impact study of Hurricane Odile, we discovered that aggregated financial data can yield insights into how crisis affect vulnerable populations (See Measuring People’s Economic Resilience to Natural Disasters). This type of work would not be possible without the efforts of our friends at UN Global Pulse and their innovation initiatives on Big Data.
Today we are happy to enter into a new collaboration with UN Global Pulse with a contribution to their “Data for Climate Action” challenge, an initiative that enables unprecedented access to data and tools from leading companies to fight climate change (See the press release). It represents another concrete way to put data to work for climate action, and we look forward to contributing once again, with our aggregated financial data and our excellence in data science.
Practically, we are going to provide, via our Open API platform, statistical data on transactions made with BBVA debit and credit cards in Spain during the last three years through. In this way, BBVA is opening its core and bank functionalities in order to boost innovation for climate action and in the whole financial industry.
About the Challenge
Data for Climate Action will target three areas relevant to the Sustainable Development Goal on climate action (SDG 13): climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and the linkages between climate change and the broader 2030 Agenda.
The challenge aims to generate original research papers and tools that demonstrate how data-driven innovation can inform on-the-ground solutions and transform efforts to fight climate change. It builds upon the model of data science competitions pioneered by organizations like Kaggle, and company-specific initiatives to share big data for the public good, such as the “Data for Development” challenges hosted by Orange.
Data scientists, researchers, and innovators from around the world are encouraged to apply and submit their proposals by April, 10th, 2017. Visit the official website at DataForClimateAction.org for additional details on the procedure.
The selected participants will have four months to conduct their research. A diverse panel of experts in climate change and data science will evaluate final submissions based on their methodology, relevance, and potential impact. Winners will be announced in November of 2017.