Victoria Belle Tan

Describe the day to day responsibilities you had during your Social Data Institute internship:
As a climate finance tracking intern, my day-to-day responsibilities largely revolved around qualitative and quantitative research and analysis. I conducted desktop research on a variety of climate topics including air quality improvement projects, fossil fuel prolonging projects, transition finance, forestry protection programmes and private climate finance. I also analysed the Climate Policy Initiative’s (CPI) Global Landscape of Climate Finance (GLCF) dataset which contains project-level climate finance information and drew insights relating to the projects I worked on. I was involved directly in the report writing for the State of Global Air Quality Funding report and the Private Climate Adaptation Finance landscape report where I wrote supplementary case studies. 

Beyond these primary responsibilities, I also attended stakeholder events and meetings. The start of my internship coincided with London Climate Action Week (LCAW) and I managed to attend a LCAW networking session with climate entrepreneurs. Within my projects, I participated in meetings with key stakeholders like Clean Air Fund, GreenCape and the South African Presidential Climate Commission, offering me deeper insight into CPI’s stakeholder and project management approaches.

What was your favourite task/responsibility during your internship? Which piece of work are you most proud of?
My favourite task which I am also most proud of was building the transition finance taxonomy for CPI’s South African Climate Finance Landscape. My mentors gave me creative freedom and autonomy to decide how I wanted to approach and structure this taxonomy building work, including which taxonomies to include and prioritise and how to identify key transitional activities. 

This task included both qualitative and quantitative aspects, allowing me to hone a variety of skillsets. Admittedly, the initial stages of research were quite overwhelming with many unfamiliar and highly technical climate and transitional terms and technologies. However, through further research, I gained a broader and deeper understanding of climate affairs especially relating to high-emitting sectors like the cement, metals, building and construction sectors. Due to the preliminary nature of my work, I needed to ensure that my data was concise and user-friendly but also comprehensive and accurate. Hence, I took the initiative to format my data in a manner that allowed for easy filtering and creation of pivot tables. I proposed a systemic approach of calculating commonality scores for each transitional activity to streamline our tracking efforts by prioritising common transitional activities across taxonomies. 

I also had the chance to present my work and progress before our key partners GreenCape and the South African Presidential Climate Commission during the interim project meetings. The positive feedback received from these stakeholders gave me a greater sense of pride in my work.

What did you find challenging during your internship?
I found the initial few weeks most challenging as I had to spend great effort understanding and contextualising the climate finance space. This internship experience was my first time dabbling in climate finance and exploring climate affairs in the African and Western region. My previous climate work experiences and academic pursuits were largely centred around climate public policy and mitigation strategies, within the Asian region. Therefore, I needed to broaden my horizons and develop a more global perspective on climate and sustainability. However, I was determined to overcome this steep learning curve, so I took the initiative to conduct additional research through attending webinars, speaking to experts in the field through coffee chats and reading more widely. The CPI team was also very helpful, always willing to share useful resources to deepen my climate finance understanding. While keeping abreast of climate affairs was a challenge for me, it was also one of my greatest takeaways from the internship.

What software and data analysis techniques did you have the opportunity to use?
I mainly employed Excel techniques during my internship. When analysing GLCF data, I had the opportunity to build pivot tables and generate appropriate data visualisation plots such as a bump chart to reflect the top 10 fossil fuel funders. When building the transition finance taxonomy, I conducted data scrapping to extract granular data about transitional activities as reflected in the various institutional reports and publications. I used filtering and pivot tables to deduce the most common transitional activities featured across taxonomies to build CPI’s internal transition finance taxonomy. Having learnt text analysis during my second year under the Q-step programme, I used R Studio to generate preliminary ranking tables of the most common words across taxonomies weighing based on term frequency-inverse document frequency. This quantitative analysis supplemented our understanding of common transitional activities.

What was it like working for your provider?
Working for CPI was a very eye-opening and enriching experience for me. As a climate non-profit advisory organisation, CPI has a very flat structure, making communication and collaboration within and across teams extremely efficient. Beyond working with their immediate teams and regions, it was common for CPI colleagues to reach out to other colleagues, even those across the globe, to discuss climate finance affairs. I found this open knowledge sharing culture very intriguing and effective; and it reshaped my perspective on team culture having been exposed largely to more bureaucratic working styles in the public service from my previous work experiences.

The entire team was very approachable and friendly towards me, including the senior leadership. To broaden my understanding of the organisation and work culture, I took the initiative to arrange coffee chats with several junior and senior colleagues. Despite their busy schedules, all of them were incredibly willing to speak and share their words of wisdom with me. These informal catchups alongside my official intern tasks granted me a more comprehensive understanding of CPI.

The London team at CPI is very global, consisting of colleagues from all around Europe and South America. This diversity of backgrounds definitely enriched the conversations and discussions around climate finance within the organisation, offering both global and local perspectives.  

While CPI is a relatively new advisory organisation, they have been expanding rapidly over the past few years (with newcomers joining the team every other week) as more interest builds up in the climate finance space especially regarding emerging trends like agri-food systems and climate data. This larger team size has allowed CPI to work on many different interesting climate finance projects, four of which I had the privilege of catching a glimpse. CPI’s forward-looking culture which readily welcomes innovation and emerging perspectives has allowed it to keep afloat and thrive during these changes.