The Future Is Now: Tomer Shalit of ClimateView On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up How Cities Take Climate Action
The one thing I wish someone had told me before I started would be to surround myself with a core team of people who think about scaling from the beginning. It’s so easy to go deep into the technology and problem area, and to get caught up in product development, but at the same time, you’ve got to also keep an eye on the bigger picture at all times.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tomer Shalit, CEO and founder of ClimateView (www.climateview.global), the Swedish climate tech company behind ClimateOS™ the world’s first platform designed for cities serious about tackling climate change.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My background is in agile development and I spent the first half of my career as a coach and consultant in agile transitions, working to drive change in the corporate world. During this time, I guided businesses and improved their capacity to tackle complex projects and problems using agile strategies, and yielded great results. But I couldn’t shake the notion that we could be using the very same tactics to move beyond corporate profit margins and solve bigger problems, such as those of a nation attempting to transition to a fossil-free economy. It was this disconnect between all the powerful methods we have at hand already, and how little we make use of them to solve some of society’s most pressing issues, that led me to start looking at Sweden’s climate transition as one big, agile project.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
My career in climate all started with a 16.5 foot long poster summarizing Sweden’s transition to a fossil free transportation sector. The fact that what once was a piece of paper has now become a powerful and intelligent digital dashboard for the nation of Sweden — endorsed by the Swedish Climate Policy Council — that is playing a pivotal role in Sweden’s path towards net zero is without a doubt the most interesting thing that happened to me!
Can you tell us about the cutting edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
We recently launched ClimateOS, a first-of-its-kind platform designed specifically for cities to build Living Climate Action Plans. For a long time, cities and others have tried to create climate action plans in isolated silos, trying to solve an interconnected problem with disjointed solutions. What we have done with this platform is create a fully integrated tool that responds dynamically to each city’s local climate journey, while putting collaboration and interdependencies front and center. This is made possible through powerful visualizations, community building and a balancing feature, which allows cities to instantly see how policy choices are interdependent on each other and to recalculate their role and impact in the transition. In doing so, we are helping turn month-long flawed assumptions into fast, verifiable collaborative calculations.
Another problem in climate action is the lack of certainty surrounding data. What we are providing cities is a turnkey dashboard, pre-populated with data in order to take the guesswork out of climate planning, and enable them to act from the get-go.
We constantly hear from cities all over the world that they feel as though there are gaps in their action plans, whether it’s in their data or methodology. The fact is, climate strategists do not want to be data officers. As such, we take the complexity out of climate planning, make it easy for them to assess targets and goals, as well as how the city is doing relative to them, so that the focus remains on implementation and acting fast. When we’re talking about something as pressing as inciting climate action, there really is no time to lose.
How do you think this might change the world?
The world already knows what needs to be done but, collectively, we’ve been stuck. At ClimateView, we are firm believers that our solution can help overcome this, and change the world by giving cities — that are responsible for more than 70% of the global CO2 emissions — the tools and the methodology needed to finally act, and do so before it’s too late.
Above all else, we think our solution proposes a mindset change, which we, as a society, have been lacking all along: it moves away from siloes, towards collaboration, across all scales and disciplines. It also moves us away from the constant need for certainty, and encourages us to embrace uncertainty, approximations and iteration, which are all characteristic of the climate transition, and are better seen as allies, than elements to fight against.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
We have been working with the Swedish Climate Policy Council since 2018, on a way to visualize the climate transition for the Nation of Sweden, which led to the creation of Panorama, the Swedish dashboard.
Throughout our work with them and several other European cities, we came to the realization that visualizing was a good first step, but that it was not enough. We then embarked on a journey to create an operating system that would enable more than visualization, that could handle all the technical and social interdependencies involved in climate action and make the most of the potential for collaborative intelligence. So we set out to find a new process, starting with Transition Targets, which we launched last year as building blocks of a successful transition, and culminating in the launch of ClimateOS, which offers all the tools and functions necessary for climate strategists to define and execute their plan to net zero.
For us, the true tipping point is when a city understands the power of the approach behind the Transition Targets. When that penny drops, a new world of possibilities opens. It is deeply rewarding when I have that kind of conversation with a city climate officer, and am able to see them see the potential.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
We are already operating in the U.K., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain, and around 26,000,000 global residents are currently benefiting from our technology, and this number is set to grow fast as we look to expand further into North America.
However, given that money talks louder than good intentions alone, we understand that for the transition to occur — not just faster, but at all — we have to make it about the bottom line. This means governments and their taxpayers must see the returns on their zero carbon investments, which is impossible if you don’t connect the necessary shifts required to the economic realities of making those shifts.
Everything before ClimateOS was about guesswork: top-down estimates by big nation states. At ClimateView, we knew we had to go from the bottom, up through every shift necessary, and begin to calculate the economic impacts as precisely as the carbon mitigation impacts.
We’re proud to say we’ll be the first company we know of to undertake this feat in this manner, and we look forward to making our first ROI visioning feature this summer.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
Word of mouth is very important to us. With our target audience being city governments, who are by nature quite collaborative, and open to sharing ideas and solutions, we try to harness these network effects and encourage cities to talk to each other and tell their colleagues about our tool. It is also a win-win situation as, globally, we can solve issues better together by learning from each other, and more importantly, the more our user base scales, the sharper our data and model become.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
With ClimateView, the aim was never to fight battles against climate deniers. The aim was always to work with and compound the goodness that already existed, because I’ve realized that there’s plenty out there. As such, I’ve really focused on empowering those who want change, but who don’t really know how to make that change happen. My way of bringing goodness to the world has really been by lifting and empowering change makers to perform change better and faster.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)
- The one thing I wish someone had told me before I started would be to surround myself with a core team of people who think about scaling from the beginning. It’s so easy to go deep into the technology and problem area, and to get caught up in product development, but at the same time, you’ve got to also keep an eye on the bigger picture at all times.
- On another level, don’t be scared to continue looking at things at the micro-level. Things are super complicated at the macro level and when they interact, but if you dig deep enough, if you persevere and seek to carefully understand how things work one by one, it’ll be super rewarding. And that’s exactly the approach I took with the climate challenge.
- Diversify the way you communicate. The pandemic and the changes it forced upon us in terms of the way we work has actually taught me the value of mass broadcasts and sharing information more productively. There’s a lot of value in mixing written communications with short videos, and short meetings, as opposed to never-ending meetings.
- Be more protective and efficient with your time. Commuting can take a lot of time away from deep concentration and thought. There’s a lot of value in working in phases and focusing on one task at a time.
- Be patient.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
At the risk of being redundant, the movement that I would like to inspire is a collaborative one, a movement that enables us to pull together all our learnings, knowledge and intelligence about the climate challenge. We need to share everything: our models and simulations, our data and insights on cost, our policies and implementations and our reasoning. The reason being that all these things, when brought together, can take us closer to our goals, faster.
Some very well known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
Trillions of dollars are being deployed globally to manage the transition to a low carbon economy, with little guidance, accuracy and transparency.
We have created an antidote to that in the form of a machine learning platform that powers the transition to a low carbon economy. The proprietary carbon abatement model behind ClimateOS precisely predicts and recommends the optimal transition pathway for each customer, whether they are a small town or an entire nation.
Cities house most of the global population, are responsible for the majority of emissions, and face unexpectedly symmetrical challenges. This initial core market creates network efforts that improve data, collaboration and outcomes for all stakeholders.
Our platform was developed with the nation of Sweden and is now used in 30+ cities across Sweden, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Canada.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Follow ClimateView on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/company/climateview) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/climateview?lang=en)
The Future Is Now: Tomer Shalit of ClimateView On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
