At COP26, countries representing 70 per cent of the global economy agreed to work together to cross the tipping points where clean technologies outcompete the fossils in each greenhouse-gas-emitting sector of the global economy. This could mark the start of a new era for climate change diplomacy. Success will need support from all sides.

Every human being has an identity. The right to identity is undisputed and recognized in international declarations and conventions. But not all human beings have a way to prove their identity. In this regard, everyone should have a means to prove who they are through an identity tool. The form such a tool should take remains a matter of dispute. Yet no matter what its form – document, card, token, mobile app or something else – it needs to be produced and managed. The mandates of Humanitarian Organizations frame their action, and this is particularly acute with Digital Identity as we will see in this chapter.

Estimates of the economic costs of climate change rely on guesswork in the face of huge uncertainties, and arbitrary judgements about what is important. The models can produce any number their creators want them to; and typically, they trivialise the risks. Despite being described as ‘worse than useless’ by leading academics, economic analysis of this kind has been credited with a Nobel Prize, and it continues to inform government policy.

A handful of governments can rewrite the rules for the global car industry, doubling the pace of the transition to zero-emission vehicles and radically cutting the costs. The COP26 campaign woke some countries up to this opportunity, while some of the world’s largest carmakers continued to fight back.

The International Organization for Standardization defines biometric recognition and Biometrics as the “automated recognition of individuals based on their biological and behavioural characteristics”. Biometrics are therefore measurable and unique human signatures that may include fingerprints, iris scans or behavioural characteristics such as the way a person walks.

Geopolitical competition between the world’s major powers does not make cooperation on climate change impossible; neither does industrial competition in clean technologies make it unnecessary. In the power, road transport, and steel sectors, there are ways that the United States, China and Europe can work together to accelerate the low carbon transitions – not by avoiding competition, but by shaping it to achieve better outcomes.

Despite solar and wind power generating the cheapest electricity in history, around forty countries are still building new coal-burning power plants – the worst thing anyone can do for climate change. How two years of campaigning led to twenty countries committing to phase-out coal power, and what needs to happen next.

Economics is not just about the allocation of scarce resources – how to ‘divide up the pie’. It is also about the creation of novelty, and the formation of new structures – how to make a pie in the first place. The new science of complexity, allied to old ideas of political economy, can help us understand how to create and change things quickly and at large scale. New economic thinking of this kind predicted the global financial crisis, but has barely begun to be applied to policy. It could transform the way we respond to climate change.

Change in the economy, just as in the climate, can be self-reinforcing, sudden, and irreversible. The world’s fastest transitions to renewable energy and electric vehicles are happening in countries where economic tipping points have been crossed in these sectors. By deliberately targeting these thresholds, we can achieve large-scale change much more quickly than we might expect. To find these opportunities, we need to move away from traditional cost–benefit analysis and adopt a very different approach to decision-making.

Humanitarian Organizations collect and process the Personal Data of individuals affected by Humanitarian Emergencies in order to perform humanitarian activities. Working primarily in Humanitarian Emergencies, they operate in situations where the rule of law may not be fully in force. In such situations, there may be limited, if any, access to justice and respect of the international human rights framework. In addition, Personal Data protection legislation may be embryonic or non-existent, or not entirely enforceable.

States around the globe have in place domestic laws authorizing governments to require service providers to disclose to them manifold types of data created by or relating to a customer, in the interest of national security and/or for use in criminal proceedings. The often-cited rationale underlying such legislation is a growing use of digital technologies, including cloud computing, for illicit purposes. Yet, even if only as a side effect, many of these legislations also enable governments to compel the disclosure of data pertaining to action of Humanitarian Organizations, processed in a public cloud environment. Such data could encompass data that Humanitarian Organizations generate, collect or exchange with others, including the contents of communications within the organization, with their partners or persons benefiting from their action. Data subject to disclosure also often include meta, location and traffic data, that is, data about the communications other than their contents, such as data about the recipient of a communication, the duration of a call and the like. For purposes of brevity, this chapter will refer to such content, meta, location and traffic data together as “Humanitarian Data”.