Explaining the development of The National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) currently in pilot, a panel at Sustainable Finance.Live discussed the complexities involved in data sharing across organisations and across countries.
Holger Kessler, senior stakeholder manager, AtkinsRéalis, gave a brief contextual insight into what the NUAR pilot is:
“We’ve been working with all the network utilities, so your gas, electricity, water, and telecommunications. Using all of our base mapping and our depiction of the landscape, we're basically recording where the assets are. All these organisations tend to take a lot of holes in order to maintain their utility assets, which are quite often underground, mainly dangerous. Getting access to this data from other organisations has been really difficult, but then looking at it from a different perspective, everybody’s in the same boat, right? So the electricity company doesn’t have the water data, and the water company doesn’t have the electricity data. So the problem they asked us to solve was: can we just come together to pool our data? [...] that’s basically what we built, and that turned into the NUAR.”
Emphasising the importance of mapping data, Donna Lyndsay, senior advisor and director, Lyndsay Consulting, described herself as a “frustrated geographer”, explaining that she finds it “really hard to understand why we do not map things out on the planet and why we don’t have visibility to actually see where things are on the planet [...] I think one of the problems we’re going to face going forward, is that nobody really knows exactly where they're investing. Nobody can see their scope or their impact.”
This planetary blindness, Lyndsay says, is a real issue when it comes to understanding geopolitical threats and climate risks, something that is crucial in encouraging more investment in nature and sustainable infrastructure.
Barriers to connectedness
A larger barrier to successful geographical connectedness is, according to Gavin Starks, founder, Icebreaker One, poorly connected data:
“We are in an era where there are more machines on Earth than people [...] the data is out there, it’s just really poorly connected. We are really rubbish at connecting data. [...] and so connecting the data is the next big thing for us. Can we connect all this data without also unleashing terrible things? Because it’s highly commercially sensitive information, it’s also in many cases, relevant to national security . So we’ve got to proceed with caution.[...] unless we sort out the data governance, we’re not going to get anywhere quickly.”
Given the complexity of underground mapping and investment, the panel then gave their definitions of what an ‘asset’ can be categorised as. The following answers - ranging from a piece of infrastructure, a tangible asset that can be visibly seen, to contrasting definitions such as anything with a digital identity or an IP - showed the differing perspectives rampant in the industry. While this may not be fundamentally a bad thing, it speaks to the fragmentation and need for a common framework that the panel discussed.
Individual vs global
Nicolien van Zwiten, climate risk specialist, Zurich Resilience Solution, focused more on the natural investors' seeming obsession with global information and global data, when individual and local data, according to her, should be better prioritised:
“I think there’s not enough value put into the individual site information [...] I think I enjoy the work a lot more when it’s on the granular level. But I think we can see people are actually actioning adaptation measures and seeing the value of it.”
Returning to the perceived fundamental complexities inherent in sharing data between organisations and countries, Kessler remarked how he and Roensdorf are both German, and how Germans are horrified by the British happiness to share the value of UK houses. While an anecdote with a broader application, it spoke to the cultural aspect that influences the difficulties with cross-country data sharing, beyond simple logistics and regulations.
Following up on the cultural aspect, Starks discussed the human element to all of it, professing that none of the issues are a technological conversation but a human one:
“Everybody wants to own the front door. Everybody wants to build a castle. Everybody wants to extract their pound of flesh from the equation, or they want to have some form of control or demand control over it. Unfortunately, that’s just not the way the web works.”
Starks explained the legal aspect that regulates who can manage which aspect, and how the web is set up to enable a safe and secure flow of data.
Speaking to the importance of this legality and guidance, Truman Semens, founder, OSCAR, reiterated how essential the rule of law is when dealing with markets beyond the UK:
“To operate the data vault, you have to have a really effective rule of law to essentially, be able to handle the contracts and breaches that have been associated with it.”
CFO Value
Concluding the session with a focus on leveraging this data within a business use case context, Lyndsay said:
“Unless we can get this in front of a CFO and help them understand what this means in terms of their business risks and opportunities, it’s always going to be an externality in terms of the opportunity around nature. So how do we make sure we get that in their way so they can actually translate it into something they can see is really important to them? I think that’s where we need to get to.”