Designing Incentive Mechanisms for Environmental Data Sharing
The Challenge:
The EU Green Deal is the EU’s current overarching economic strategy, aiming at delivering lasting prosperity within the environmental capacity of the planet. A fundamental aspect of this strategy is the incorporation of environmental considerations into economic decisions – the decisions taken by investors, companies, customers (including public authorities) and into policy making. The key piece of the puzzle which remains absent is the sourcing of adequate, relevant, quality environmental data, to meet future demands. The EU’s solution has been to propose a Green Deal Dataspace, as part of its over-arching EU Data Strategy. A Dataspace can be seen the creation of the public infrastructure underlying an efficient market for the data to enable a green economy, in the same way that public road systems facilitate economic activity and development.
The Green Deal Dataspace needs to be designed in ways which incentivise the generation, updating and maintenance of reliable, and access to relevant high-quality environmental data points, globally.
Our Approach:
Life Itself Labs was engaged by GIZ as an expert partner to conduct research and stakeholder engagement around the potential incentive models which could underpin the Green Deal Dataspace. Having conducted an initial scoping of the data ecosystem and available incentive mechanisms, we are engaging a number of key stakeholder groups from across diverse industries to understand the sector specific needs and challenges which incentive models must engage with. Identifying a need to demonstrate alternative possibilities for incentivisation we have guided stakeholders through a structured process of learning from other contexts and examples, to seed ideas of how a new future for data sharing might be achieved. Our final report will be delivered to EU and G7 policymakers to inform the design of the Dataspace.