FAQ

What is Connect-it?  Connect-it visualizes data on cooperative initiatives for climate change gathered in the CONNECT-project. You can find more about the CONNECT-project on www.fragmentation.eu.

What is a ‘cooperative initiative’?  A cooperative initiative is a collaborative arrangement between different actors such as countries, cities, regions, companies, investors and other civil society groups that engage in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Our selection criteria are described in more detail here .

Why are ‘cooperative initiatives’ important?  Cooperative initiatives form a bottom-up response to the global climate change challenge. Our dataset contains over 12,000 cities, companies, regions, countries and other actors taking different forms of climate actions. Connect-it was created to untangle the messiness of the emerging universe of cooperative initiatives.

How should I use Connect-it?  Connect-it presents data on 89 cooperative initiatives for climate change in 6 different views. Clicking your way through the different views, you discover new connections and perspectives on the data. In the side-bar menu on the left side of the screen, you will find additional and detailed information on the different cooperative initiatives, their members and how they connect.

What do the links in the ‘network view’ represent?  Every time a cooperative initiative shares a member with another initiative, a link is formed. In the side-bar menu you can explore which members connect to which initiative.

What is the impact of ‘cooperative initiatives’?  Researchers are working hard on assessing if cooperative initiatives actually contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There is currently no robust dataset available for assessing the impacts of the initiatives in the Connect-it universe. You can find more information in studies and reports in the ‘article view’ in Connect-it.

Are there other sources of data on cooperative initiatives?  The UNFCCC’s Non-State Actor Zone on Climate Action ( NAZCA) and UNEP’s Climate Initiative Portal also contain information on international and transnational climate actions and collaborations similar to those here in Connect-it. For an overview of what different databases contain, check this article .

Who is behind Connect-it?  Connect-it has been created by researchers at the Environmental Policy Department at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands (http://www.ivm.vu.nl/) in cooperation with Template, a visual design studio (http://template01.info//). For more information, comments on the page or the data we use, please contact philipp.pattberg[at]vu.nl or oscar.widerberg[at]vu.nl.