Driving Climate Action Through Data: How C40 Cities is Scaling Knowledge for a Healthier Planet
The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time, and cities are on the frontlines. Home to more than half of the world’s population, cities are both major contributors to global emissions and critical drivers of climate solutions. Delivering cleaner air, healthier communities, and resilient infrastructure requires not just commitment, but the power of data to guide and accelerate action.
The C40 Knowledge Hub: Turning Collective Knowledge into Action
To ensure that climate action scales beyond its membership, C40 launched the C40 Knowledge Hub in 2019. The hub is a public, comprehensive library designed to support all cities, not just members, in confronting climate change.
Focused on tried-and-tested actions and emerging ideas, the Knowledge Hub empowers leaders with clarity on what to prioritize, how to deliver it, and who’s already doing it successfully. Covering sectors from energy and transport to food systems, waste, and air quality, the hub transforms collective knowledge into practical, replicable solutions.
Qlik dashboards are woven throughout the hub, translating complex climate datasets into decision-ready insights. From greenhouse gas emissions to green jobs, transport, and waste, these dashboards help leaders understand progress, evaluate policy, and build confidence to act.
Innovation in Action: The Qlik Cares #DataForGood Hackathon
Knowledge only becomes powerful when it inspires innovation. To show what’s possible, Qlik and C40 partnered on the Qlik Cares #DataForGood Hackathon at Qlik Connect 2025.
Over five weeks, global teams of developers and data enthusiasts explored how emissions, transport and behavior data could be used to show the real-world impact of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) and how the approach might scale to other C40 cities.
The winning solution came from Josh Reid and André Hamon of Ando, a Qlik customer, who built an interactive Qlik Cloud Analytics app that showed how London’s ULEZ is improving air quality and changing travel patterns. Their app let users compare results against a “No ULEZ” baseline, explore differences by borough and time period, and even use a conversational assistant powered by Qlik Answers to quickly surface insights.
“Hackathons like this are such a great way to put your skills to the test, see just how much you can achieve with Qlik, and apply all that capability to causes that really matter.” said Josh Reid of Ando, “We’re proud of what we accomplished, hopeful it will make a meaningful difference, and excited to take part in more Qlik Cares initiatives in the future.”
This competition showcased the kind of innovation and collaboration that can inspire new approaches across the C40 network and beyond.
Scaling Impact Through the Cloud
C40’s own journey with Qlik demonstrates how climate leadership extends to every aspect of operations. Recently, C40 migrated its internal dashboards from a hosted Qlik Sense Enterprise deployment to Qlik Cloud SaaS—a move that gives the organization access to new capabilities while boosting scalability and performance.
With Qlik Cloud, C40 can now take advantage of advanced features like Qlik Predict for AI-powered forecasting and Qlik Answers for conversational insights, along with a continually expanding set of cloud-native tools designed to accelerate discovery and collaboration.
The next step is to transition its public dashboards into an anonymous Qlik Cloud tenant, allowing C40 to retire its legacy Qlik Analytics Platform (QAP). With the addition of Qlik Talend Cloud, C40 is streamlining data integration and pipelines, ensuring consistency and reliability across both internal and public-facing platforms.
“Qlik has been instrumental in helping us move faster and more effectively with our data.” said Angel Monjarás of C40 Cities, “Migrating to Qlik Cloud and Qlik Talend Cloud is giving us access to powerful new capabilities that make climate insights more scalable, more accessible, and more impactful for cities worldwide.”