 Everyone's different here at the Canopy Workspace, different organisations, projects and specialisms. But here inside the Entopia building there's also a common goal that brings us together. There's a collective desire to accelerate change and sustainability is at the heart of it. The Canopy is all about collaboration, a community sharing and learning from each other's experiences. And this is Canopy Connect, a podcast where you can get to know your fellow members at the Canopy. This time on the podcast. My name is Helen Jackson and I'm Director of Climate Node. So let's connect. I have been working in climate and environmentally related areas for about 20 years now. So a long time ago I started Life as a Physicist, I started a PhD in Atmospheric Physics and I decided academia wasn't for me but that was my kind of introduction to climate related matters. I then took that onto working in Consultancy so I worked for three different consultancy all involved in various ways in researching environmental policy, climate economics, climate finance and so on. I worked for a company called Vivid Economics which set out to be a world leading consultancy in climate and energy economics and policy and achieved that. I worked in the early days when we were getting started it was very intense and they are now part of McKinsey. That's my background, 20 years of experience in this space, a mixture of physical science background environmental economics background as well as data encoding as well. So I was working with an organisation called the Climate Bonds Initiative and their purpose is to come up with methodologies for flagging bonds that are linked to projects which are low carbon and climate resilient. We were working on trying to flag whether hydropower projects were climate resilient and that process took a very long time and it made me realise how complicated these matters are and it made me realise how much context there is, how much context specific to local geography there is in determining whether an asset is particularly at risk from climate change. So I began thinking okay there's a lot of people out there working with climate models working on quantifying what will happen to specific meteorological variables like precipitation and temperature and so on and are we missing a lot of this finer grained localised context when we are talking about climate risk? And I began to think okay so how would you even begin to gather this more localised context specific information and I thought okay well a lot of it is contained in scientific papers, reports, maybe even newspaper articles so how would you begin to efficiently compile and organise that information? And that was how Climate Nodes started and as part of that process I've been of course looking very closely at natural language processing which is the branch of AI which deals with getting computers to understand human language and so although Climate Nodes describes itself as an organisation which is using data science in general it is very very heavily focused at the moment on natural language processing and that's a fascinating topic. And most recently I've been working on a project to derive historic data for surface water flood events in England so this is when you get flooding not because of the places near a river that's versus banks or they're not near the sea it's just the sheer amount of rainfall that falls in a short space of time overwhelms the drainage system and this is a growing problem in the UK. People may remember that there's quite serious flash flood events that happened in London in 2021 but we have very very little historic data on it because these events are often quite localised and they're over quite quickly so it's actually difficult to get data on them. So I worked on a project to compile information of these events from newspaper reports to also detect them from newspaper reports and our project's now over but it's been quite intensive work and if people are interested they can look on Climate Nodes website climatenode.org and then there's a page called Maps and then you can go to see the results of that particular project. I think success for me looks like people really using the data that results from the project and using that and well particularly in scientific research so one of the uses for the urban flash flood project I've just been talking about could be in validating flood forecasts I've had some discussions with people from the Met Office about that if they take the data that I've got and use that to validate flood forecasts I'd be absolutely delighted another use might be people who are modelling surface water flooding if they could then use those results to validate their models so I think success for me it really looks like doing something useful with that data which helps us as a society adapt to the changes that we're seeing. I have been working at home for a very long time so you know even when I was working full time for vivid economics I was working at home and that was 13 years ago so for me it's an absolute blessing to be able to just come into a physical building and interact with people frankly. Second there's the network obviously you know there's a great opportunity to go and meet lots of people both the canopy network and the CISL network and a third I think it's just the chance encounter that comes with just bumping into people you know going to events and talking to people and just being able to bounce ideas of people and know what they're doing and you know maybe some potential collaboration or just you know validation even of what you're doing comes from that so I think it's really valuable. People are very welcome to email me so it's Helen at climatenode.org you can visit climatenodes website www.climatenode.org I am here two days a week I'm normally Workspace 3 Monday tends to be the day you're most likely to find me and the other days are somewhat more variable but if anyone wants to have a chat just get in touch I'm aware that you know if I want climatenode a bit success then one day I might be employing people, managing people if anybody wants to give me some hints on how I even go about starting doing that then I would gratefully receive them because otherwise I'm just going to have to make it up as I go along. Thanks for checking out this episode of Canopy Connect. Log in to your office R&D profile to connect with your canopy neighbours just head to the members page and find them. This is a canopy podcast made by New Allotment. The canopy is part of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership supported by the European Regional Development Fund. Thank you for listening.