ChatNetZero - The world’s first climate target chatbot launches, promising to supercharge net-zero literacy and accountability

• ChatNetZero (beta) is a large language model (LLM)-based chatbot and question-answering platform able to decipher the nuances of “net zero” and determine the credibility of decarbonization plans set by businesses, governments, and financial institutions.

• ChatNetZero (beta) is trained on the Net Zero Tracker (NZT) database - the world’s biggest database of company and government climate commitments, with more than 4,000 entities and growing - plus analytical reports written by the NZT consortium and the United Nations’ High-Level Expert Group on the Net Zero Commitments of Non-State Entities.

• Instead of combing through a spreadsheet’s many thousands of rows or reading a lengthy report to find an entity’s target, users can ask ChatNetZero, which provides an expert-vetted answer in seconds, including citations of source materials.

• ChatNetZero improves upon existing LLMs and text-based AI tools with a mechanism that prevents ‘hallucinated’ responses - plus it provides source-based information to demystify the ‘net zero’ concept.

New York Climate Week, NYC, 22nd September 2023:

ChatNetZero, the world’s first net-zero policy and action chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs), providing a potent fact-checking and anti-greenwashing tool, is now live and publicly available for all to use.

LLMs are the machine-learning technology that underlie popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard. Unlike generic LLMs, which draw from all publicly-available information on the Internet, ChatNetZero’s beta pilot is trained on narrowly-focused, expert-vetted data found on the Net Zero Tracker, a database tracking more than 4,000 corporate, national, and local government entities and their decarbonization goals. While ChatGPT is only trained on data through 2021, the Net Zero Tracker is updated on an ongoing basis and is the world’s broadest ‘living’ database of climate commitments of the world’s largest companies, national and subnational governments.

Data-Driven EnviroLab (DDL), a research group based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a member of the Net Zero Tracker consortium, teamed up with technology start-up Arboretica, based in the Netherlands, to develop ChatNetZero’s beta phase with grant support from the IKEA Foundation.

Dr. Angel Hsu, Director of DDL, said:

“As the window for climate action narrows, the decarbonization goals of the world’s largest polluters are falling under an ever-brighter spotlight, held up by their stakeholders - from investors, to employees, citizens and journalists. Some of their questions concern whether entities’ targets are ambitious enough to deliver the rapid emission cuts that science demands. While other stakeholders, especially regulators, want to know which company targets are designed merely to misdirect and mislead, instead of representing a real commitment to tackle the company’s fair share of emissions.

“We – the public, governments, civil society and businesses – need credible information to decipher who is doing what and doing it in a robust and meaningful way. That’s where ChatNetZero comes in. By providing a gateway to the world’s largest living database on the integrity of net zero commitments, we hope to increase transparency and, in turn, boost ambition and real action.”

ChatNetZero can accurately answer questions about climate and net-zero commitments for nearly 200 countries, every region in the largest 25 emitting nations, from California to Guangdong, every city with over 500,000 inhabitants, and the 2,000 largest publicly listed companies in the world by revenue. It can answer questions like:

• “Tell me about the targets of Amazon and Walmart, and do they cover Scope 3 emissions?”

• “Are offsets a credible way to reach net-zero emissions?”

• “Can a fossil fuel company set a credible net-zero target?”

The public, private entities, and investors share many similar questions, seeking answers to guide consumer and investment decisions, as well as to compare sectoral climate practices and identify problematic areas and unknowns. ChatNetZero’s beta version responds to prompts with answers that draw from Net Zero Tracker data and accompanying reports, including guidelines from the UN’s High-Level Expert Group on Net Zero Accountability released last November. Equipped with these analytical insights, ChatNetZero will be able to answer these and a myriad of other questions to expand net zero literacy overall.

Speaking at the ChatNetZero launch today at the Climate Action Data 2.0: Accountability Showcase at New York Climate Week, Arboretica co-founder James Zhang, said:

“We have developed an anti-hallucination algorithm and citation model so that ChatNetZero generates high-quality, accurate responses.

“Existing generic LLMs have a high probability of providing false information. We built ChatNetZero to be scientifically robust, giving users confidence in the veracity of its responses and ability to reference the precise source material for every response.”

Bolstering ChatNetZero’s model training and validation is the network of scientific experts and practitioners behind the Net Zero Tracker (NZT), including DDL, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) and Oxford Net Zero in the UK, and NewClimate Institute in Germany.

The NZT was launched in 2021 and is established as the most comprehensive and up-to-date, independent source of information on the quality and quantity of climate commitments. To date, the NZT has produced six set-piece analyses, which now reach media audiences exceeding 500 million people. Its findings have been reported in more than 400 media clippings, including Time Magazine, ‘John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight’ and the Financial Times. Decision makers from British Prime Minister Sunak to Commissioner Crenshaw of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission have cited NZT data. The NZT database is collated through a combination of machine-learning-aided data collection and extraction, along with a community of more than 300 volunteers who are led from the University of Oxford.

As well as improving interaction with the NZT’s data, ChatNetZero’s next phase aims to broaden the scope of documents available for users to query, as well as a “light” Internet connection that will allow for constrained, limited access to additional materials. DDL and Arboretica are also planning to introduce the ability for users to upload a climate strategy or policy document, which could be compared against the NZT’s existing data. In this way, ChatNetZero could provide nearly instantaneous benchmarking for companies or governments seeking to understand how their own efforts compare with industry standards or their peers.

The ChatNetZero launch at New York Climate Week coincides with the UN General Assembly's Climate Ambition Summit - which aims to accelerate action by governments, business, finance, local authorities and civil society. This follows the launch of the Global Stocktake report, which confirms that the world is not on target to curb global warming and more action is needed ‘on all fronts’ to stem the climate crisis, including improving the accountability of private and subnational entities. In June, the UN climate secretariat announced a new “Recognition and Accountability Framework” requiring private and local entities to produce data and reports that transparently detail how they intend to achieve their climate goals.

ChatNetZero (beta) can be accessed from chatnetzero.ai.

Notes to editors:

About Net Zero Tracker (NZT):

Net Zero Tracker is the most comprehensive and up-to-date database of net zero commitments made by nations, states & regions, cities and major companies. It includes:

• all UNFCCC member states and a selected number of territories;

• subnational states and regions in the 25 largest emitting countries;9

• all cities around the world with populations over 500,000;

• Publicly-traded companies that were listed in the Forbes Global 2000 in 2020.10

Using a combination of automated web data-scraping and manual searching by volunteer data analysts working in a range of languages, the Tracker gathers and collates data on the status of net zero targets and robustness parameters across these 4000+ entities. Parameters include the existence of interim targets, intentions regarding offsetting, the existence of a published plan, and what the target covers in terms of greenhouse gases and emission scopes.

NZT is an independent research consortium, comprising The Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU); Data-Driven EnviroLab (UNC); NewClimate Institute; and Oxford Net Zero.

At the core of the NZT database is a cohort of student volunteers, primarily from the University of Oxford, who scrutinise the robustness of targets of all UNFCCC member countries, all cities with populations greater than 500,000, all regions in the top 25-emitting countries, and all of the 2,000 largest public companies. NZT applies advanced AI/ML approaches to automatically extract key data points on net zero targets to increase the efficiency and scalability of data collection.

About Data-Driven EnviroLab (DDL):

The Data-Driven EnviroLab (DDL) is an interdisciplinary and international group of researchers, scientists, programmers, and visual designers. DDL uses innovative data analytics to distill signals from large-scale and unconventional datasets and develop policy solutions to contemporary environmental problems. We promote evidence-based approaches to problem-solving while boosting information disclosure and transparency among public institutions, private companies, civic organizations, and individual citizens.

DDL is based at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and is a joint initiative between the Department of Public Policy, the Environment, Ecology, and Energy (E3P) Program, and the Institute for Environment at UNC. As an academic research lab led by Angel Hsu, Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, we have a particular mission to help train data-minded scholars and leaders in the field of environmental policy. Our group is primarily comprised of student researchers at the undergraduate and graduate levels, along with a few full-time researchers.

DDL has recently published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as One Earth, Environmental Research: Infrastructure Sustainability, Climate Policy, Nature Communications and Nature Urban Sustainability. The group also publishes yearly reports on Global Climate Action in collaboration with NewClimate Institute and researchers at Utrecht University, the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), Radboud University and CDP. DDL Director Angel Hsu also coauthored the 2022 National Academies of Sciences report titled “Greenhouse Gas Emissions Information for Decision Making: A Framework Going Forward.” Angel Hsu was a contributing author to the IPCC 6th Assessment Report and lead author of the 2018 UNEP Emissions Gap Report chapter on non-state and subnational actors.

About Arboretica:

Arboretica, headquartered in Rotterdam (Netherlands), is a pioneer in using AI to expedite the work of environmentalists and policymakers. We constantly innovate cutting-edge data-driven technologies to make sustainability analyses more streamlined and scalable.

Arboretica has helped global policymakers, universities, institutions, and corporations to automate manual working processes, discover hidden insights, and create tangible impact in environmental/sustainability use cases.