Giving Compass' Take:

• Adele Peters explains that a digital dashboard that government employees and citizens can access to create accountability is essential to Sweden's play to be carbon neutral by 2045.

• How can other countries and local governments learn from Sweden's efforts? 

• Learn about a similar approach for companies. 

By 2045, Sweden plans to cut its emissions to net zero. A new digital visualization shows exactly what it’s doing to reach that goal—and is designed to help policymakers move faster to fill in gaps in the current plan and make sure it actually succeeds. It’s also fully open to the public, so anyone can hold the government accountable.

“The tool is a catalyst to change the way you work,” says Tomer Shalit, CEO of ClimateView, a Stockholm-based startup that developed the new dashboard for the Swedish Climate Policy Council, an organization tasked with making sure that the country’s policies are in line with its goal to become carbon neutral.

A typical government climate report might be 2,000 pages long, take months to complete, and could be outdated by the time it’s published. Shalit started by taking a single report—a giant tome about transportation policy—and translating the data into 6.5-foot-long poster that illustrated emissions from every type of transportation and all of the policies in play. He started approaching government officials with the prototype, and the feedback was immediate: Everyone saw the value in a tool that presented the big picture and made a complex issue more manageable. Vattenfall, a large energy company that Shalit was working with, decided to help support a full digital version of the tool.

The digital dashboard, which includes all of the details from every Swedish climate report, lets anyone dive into the details of emissions across the economy, what policy is in place to address it, and how far the country is off track from meeting its 2045 goal. If you look at the emissions from cars, for example, you can see how much different approaches might cut those emissions–not just shifting to electric cars, but improving bike and pedestrian paths and public transportation–and see small charts about progress and which policies the country already has or plans to implement. It also lets nonprofits and others give feedback and propose new solutions. For government agencies that might not have worked in a coordinated way in the past, it makes it easier to understand the problem and work together.

Read the full article about Sweden by Adele Peters at FastCompany.