Green Deal Data Observatory | Eviota

Access to Green Finance

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:46:00 +0100

Photo: Eddie Zhang

Cultural and creative enterprises often need help with access to finance. In the EU’s policy documents, this is often attributed to their higher perceived risk, lack of tangible assets to provide collateral, and difficulty of valuing the sector’s intangible assets. Eviota aims to support access to green finance, which can alleviate the problems of many businesses.

The Creative Europe’s guarantee facility for the cultural and creative sectors and industries was based on the assumption in 2016 that the financing gap of the CCSIs was up to 1 billion euros per year ¹. In our view, this gap increased in the 2020s because the earlier estimate assumed a “business as usual” and did not estimate the transition costs to zero carbon.

The sustainable finance package estimates that to make the EU climate-neutral by 2050, Europe needs between €175 to €290 billion in additional yearly investment in the following decades². Because according to the European Investment Fund, with varying sizes in European countries, on average, 5.5% of the EU value added is related to cultural and creative sectors. We assume that the industry should be able to absorb about €8-15 billion for its transition to a more sustainable development path³. While this “financing gap” is based on a different methodology and should be seen more as a “gross financing need”, which includes the replacement of infrastructure and amortisation of infrastructure, which is in corporate finance seen as business continuity by any of means, the financing gap is enormous.

The European Green Deal has the financing capacity to meet this demand⁴. Still, in our experience with music and audiovisual enterprises, the absorption capacity towards sustainable finance is lower than with traditional, non-sustainable finance. The Survey on access to finance for cultural and creative sectors: evaluate the financial gap of different cultural and creative sectors to support the impact assessment of the Creative Europe programme identified mainly business model problems and small enterprise size as the main culprit. Our Eviota for Music highlighted another critical problem: oversimplified management controlling/reporting systems that cannot support the creative enterprise’s and its stakeholders’ business decisions. The oversimplified accounting system must provide more information for a loan application and a green loan application.

Our Eviota system hits two birds with a stone: we improve the quality of the management information and connect it with reliable sustainability indicators. We are developing ways to adhere to the requirements of the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive⁵ (i.e., the modification of the EU Accounting Directive and auditing rules) within the scope of simplified accounting typical for microenterprises. We are working on an objective measurement tool that can be used both by creative enterprises to convince their public donors, corporate sponsors, banks, insurers, and investors that their economic activities are sustainable; or to work for financial intermediary organisations to assess the financial, environmental, social and governance sustainability of their potential lenders or investees.

Survey on access to finance for cultural and creative sectors—Evaluate the financial gap of different cultural and creative sectors to support the impact assessment of the creative Europe programme ↩︎
European Commission: Financing Sustainable Growth. This factsheet is the source of the diagrams. ↩︎
European Investment Fund: Market Analysis of the Cultural and Creative Sectors in Europe—A Sector to Invest In ↩︎
Access to finance facilitating support for the Green Deal By Ambroise Fayolle, Vice-President of the European Investment Bank ↩︎
Directive (EU) 2022/2464 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 December 2022 amending Regulation (EU) No 537/2014, Directive 2004/109/EC, Directive 2006/43/EC and Directive 2013/34/EU, as regards corporate sustainability reporting (Text with EEA relevance) ↩︎

From Accounting to Environmental Accountability

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 11:46:00 +0100

Photo: Nick Morrison

Like all creative enterprises, music enterprises are often founded and led by creative people with artistic or technical backgrounds. In Europe and the U.S., most music technicians, artist, and their managers work in very small enterprises. These enterprises usually need qualified business or financial administrators and HR- or data specialists. They often see accounting as a necessary or even unnecessary evil that is only used to report taxes. The accounting system is often outsourced to a chartered accountant or an accounting firm, and accounts are only reviewed when it is absolutely necessary: on Tax Day.

Accounting is not a beloved activity. In the last 20 years, almost all European countries allowed further and further simplifications in financial accounting and reporting as well as tax reporting. Our experience is that, in many cases, this has led to oversimplification: the resulting financial accounting system needs to be revised to support a loan application, grant administration, or simply to identify perils to profitability or opportunities for economic growth. Such a revision is a great opportunity to take into consideration the needs of sustainability reporting.

What is simplified reporting?

If you look at the annual report of a listed company like Spotify, you see that their reports tend to be over 100 pages, and they publish mandatory reports every quarter. They employ an entire army of tax specialists to pay various dues. On the other hand, a typical music enterprise creates one mandatory report per year, which can be as thin as four pages depending on the country where the report is made.

Microenterprises often pay a simplified tax, i.e., they do not have to pay corporate profit tax, value-added tax, dividend tax, etc., separately. Simplified reporting usually applies to microenterprises (with less than 10 employees or 2 million euros of annual turnover.)

Less accounting and less granular information on the creative enterprise’s activity means less accountability for the economic or social impact of the enterprise. Creative enterprises are parts of complex value chains around film productions, music festivals, or advertising, to name a few, where tracing sources of water use, carbon footprints or strengthening injustices against women in pay or opportunity are not trivial. We believe that some level of accounting is necessary for accountability in terms of sustainability.

Eviota for Music and Eviota for Film aims to support micro- and small enterprises with better management, supported by connected financial and sustainability accounting that reflects the management novelties of 2023. We do not claim that sustainability management can be performed based on financial accounts. Still, we are confident that a financial accounting system must also register every economic activity with an environmental and social footprint. We want to help creative businesses adjust their accounting, controlling, and reporting practices because they can be more profitable. They can access the new, supported green loans and insurance. They can gain new grants and donors. And eventually, they can avoid greenwashing and pinkwashing.

Eviota is simple but not oversimplified. We connect your general ledger to reliable benchmarks and apply double materiality facts to focus your attention on financial performance and your environmental footprint. We aim to create a reliable, informative overview of your enterprise in less than an hour and start planning your transition to a more sustainable growth path.

Eviota for Film

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 09:40:00 +0100

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

The Eviota project aims to create sustainability reports connected to the financial accounts of companies, NGOs, and civil society actors. The first phase concentrates on greenhouse gases and air pollutants. We want to create reliable estimates of the carbon and other pollutants footprint of music-related (social) enterprises based on their spending (“connected financial and sustainability reporting”.)

Creating connected sustainability reports has many advantages.

It shows consumers, donors, and buyers that the company cares for sustainable growth.
The organization can ask for grants related to increasing sustainability.
In the EU, the company will be eligible for cheaper green loans, green insurance, and green investments.
Large corporations, including music event donors, may require their supply chain to produce credible sustainability metrics.

There are some difficulties that we want to overcome in this project.

Connected financial and sustainability reports are complex, they require plenty of data, and mandatory only for ’large’ corporations. Just like small companies can make ‘simplified tax returns’ and ‘simplified financial reports’, we aim to create a less complex and cheap simplified, connected financial and sustainability report.
Due to the high complexity, they take a long time to create and are costly: the European Commission estimates their total cost at €10,000.

In Europe, there are a handful of large organizations present in the music industry. So, there is no regulatory push for music enterprises to engage in sustainability reporting. However, this means that they cannot benefit from the advantages above.

Table of Contents

Our approach

Most sustainability calculators are very complex because they use many data inputs from the company. Our mission is to reduce the complexity; however, this would require plenty of experience to define the shortcuts. We will compare all spending (upstream value chain or suppliers) and all income (downstream value chain or buyers) to the know spending of all similar organizations in your country in the comparison year.

To reduce the data need, we only take into consideration cost/income groups that meet the financial materiality treshold, i.e. 3% of your total costs or total business-to-business sales.

We offer free, manual calculation in the first phase to ensure we define these simplifications well. To reduce the time needed to collect data about your purchases and sales, we will rely on a part of the “trial balance”, because this is available in your accounting system (and can be exported by your accounting software.) The trial balance is an annual summary of the general ledger accounts. We need only the expenses and revenues accounts, and do not need assets, liabilities, gains and losses.

A part of a fictitious Italian trial balance with Italian and English language labels. The blurred numbers are randomized from an actual trial balance and presented in a different currency than the original.

Why the trial balance?

We start from a document that every company has, and does not require extra management time to prepare, the so-called trial balance. This is an accounting document that can be obtained from the company’s accountant.

A trial balance is a report that lists the balances of all general ledger accounts of a company at a certain point in time. The accounts reflected on a trial balance are related to all major accounting items, including assets, liabilities, equity, revenues, expenses, gains, and losses. It is primarily used to identify the balance of debits and credits entries from the transactions recorded in the general ledger at a certain point in time.

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We do not need the ledger, only the annual account summaries of revenues and expenses.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity. This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

This way we avoid a lot of data entry into the calculator. At this stage, you we do not offer an uploader, because we want to test manually different trial balances before automating the uploading process.

How does it work?

In the future, we hope our calculator will ask the user to upload the trial balance to a secure location, answer a few questions, and get the sustainability report back. Because the trial balance has no strictly defined form (it differs between small, very small, and medium-sized companies, and country to country), we need to do some manual reporting to standardize this procedure.

We use the trial balance (see examples of a trial balance), because that is a standard document that your accountant has about all your purchases and all your sales.

We compare your company’s supply purchases and sales with all similar companies in your country and industry for the comparison year. In this example, we compare the data of Hungarian publisher’s GHG emissions using the purchases in its trial balance with the emissions of all Hungarian publishers (based on their data reported to the tax authorities) in 2020.

Currently your accountant creates two documents, which are binded together and published by law in one “book”, your (Simplified) Annual Report. In Europe, all micro- and small companies create a Simplified Annual Report.

the annual (simplified) balance sheet
the annual (simplified) profit and loss statement

Using exactly the same data, i.e. the “trial balance”, and adding sustainability data, we will create a third document: 3. The annual (simplified) sustainability report, which is a non-financial disclosure of the annual report.

Process: From your data to the final report

We sign a non-disclosure agreement.
You send us your trial balance.
We create a first draft of your carbon footprint. We categorize your suppliers (costs) and buyers (income) into 64 categories for which we have reliable data. See methodology below.
Most of our calculations are made with iotables, our scientific and open source software. We rely on open data from the Green Deal Data Observatory, which in turn processes reliable data of Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency in readily usable format. The use of open source reporting tools and open data helps keep our costs low.
We set up a short call with you and your accountant to make some clarifications.
We provide you the final report.

What is the report?

The report is technically a non-financial disclosure (NFD) of your annual financial report, which currently consists of the balance sheet, the profit and loss statement. You can add an optional sustainability report as a third part.

The making of an NFD is not mandatory for small- and medium sized companies and NGOs that usually produce simplified financial reports.
It is two paragraphs of factual text, accompanies with a table and chart about how much greenhouse gases (or other pollutants) are created by your activities.
A sustainability report is a first step to factual sustainability management and avoiding greenwashing. When you know factually how your activities (including purchases from your suppliers) cause greenhouse gas emissions (or contribute to the gender paygap), you can devise steps to reduce your negative impact, or increase your positive impact.
We work with reliable expert advice so that you can act in a credible way, and make credible promises to your customers, your audience, your donors, granting agencies, bank, insurance, or investors.

Methodology

We follow the CPA classification for your suppliers and corporate buyers. See Statistical Classification of Products by Activity Some categories, like B MINING AND QUARRYING are aggregated, i.e. we cannot make a distintion among various mining activities. In service industries this is not required.
We use the same data for comparators that states use to monitor the Paris Accord. We use the categories of the System of National Accounts, which is harmonized on the level of the EU and the level of the UN. In 2022 we only work with EU and candidate countries that follow the EU version, and we’ll adjust our software in 2023 for the rest of the world.
Our sustainability methodology is based on the Global GHG Accounting & Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry.
We follow the EFRAG’s Proposals for a Relevant and Dynamic EU Sustainability Reporting Standard Setting (pdf download) because this will be the basis of future, mandatory reporting standards in Europe.
We will help small music organizations in their sustainability reporting, where detail data and reporting standards are only available for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Music Eviota project is supported by the MusicAIRE.

Open collaboration

Our project is based on open collaboration. Our proposal, provides us with resources to supply further music businesses, music civil society organizations and researchers with high-quality data (during the duration of the project for free.) We are already looking for interested parties to put our data and research projects into use and validate their usability and quality in real-life policy or business development scenarios.

Why are we developing this service?

The European Green Deal, which includes the proposed Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and the sustainable finance package, aims to set the European economy on a permanent decarbonization and sustainability increasing path with adjusting the rules how economic activities are financed by bank loans, insurance, investments, and direct subsidies. From 2023, it will be cheaper to get loans, insurance, and other types of funding for organizations that can prove that they follow the environmental, social and governance path set out in the Paris Agreement and other UN, OECD, and EU agreements.

Requirements for connecting financial and sustainability reporting.

Correct and reliable sustainability management will come with many financial advantages and increased responsibility. The European Financial Reporting Advisory Board is currently preparing the new combined financial and sustainability reporting standard that will be used in banks, insurance, investment, granting, and the large companies of Europe in their entire supply and purchaser chain. The European Commission estimates that compliance costs until the end of 2023 will amount to 4 billion euros, with reporting and auditing costs mounting 10,000 euros per organization. While music small and medium sized organizations (MSMEs) and limited liability civil society organizations (CSOs) will be exempted from mandatory sustainability management and audited reporting, they can still comply in a non-audited and voluntary way.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollution, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. Our previous research shows that particularly the live music industry that needs a large workforce, suffers from underuse of, and discrimination of female workers in various technical and even managerial roles. Our system will be able to flag risks of gender paygap and related issues in the entire value chain and of course, provide good benchmarks for internal activities.

Our review of the environmental, social and governance risk management (ESG sustainability management) suggests that complying with ESG standards is not only a pre-requisite to get cheaper loans (less important) and cheaper insurance (very important in live music), but also a requirement by corporate sponsors of events, and even a large part of the audience. While some music organizations already provide sustainability reporting, they are not standardized and are less factual as they are not connected to accounting information at every point. Our solution aims to give much credibility to both the sustainability reports and non-financial disclosures of the financial reports (which are not mandatory for MSMEs but increase their trustworthiness on an elective basis if they are included.)

Growing interest for ESG in select countries.

Future plans: Social Sustainability and Anti-Bribary

MusicAIRE Green Recovery in the Music Sector

Co-funded by the European Union

The objectives of the MusicAIRE GREEN recovery program is increasing the music sector’s environmental sustainability and ecological awareness with a view to greening the music industry, in particular live acts, festivals and touring, as well as supporting innovative start-ups aiming at decreasing the environmental footprint of online data storing and music distribution.

Co-funded by the European Union

Open Data Day in The Hague 2023

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 13:00:00 +0100

Reprex is a finalist for The Hague Innovators Award 2022, and the prize of the audience, in the startup category with our respectable competitors, Sibö, WECO, STHRIVE and ECOBLOQ.

Reprex will organize events on the International Open Data Day. Save the date in your calendar.

Data Observatory Labs

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 13:40:00 +0100

Check out our slides. We are still looking for certain partners.

We want to build a network of Innovation Labs, connecting labs and businesses that bring these novel scientific and innovation results nearer to civil society actors, individual creators, and microenterprises in services. We bring data-, sustainability-, rights management innovation, and novel distribution models nearer to the grassroots level of creation. We want to transform scientific and technical development into business development available for small creative organizations without a data engineering/science function.

Table of Contents

WP 1 Coordination

Reprex aims to coordinate this project with a dedicated, experienced Creative Europe project manager who is familiar with the music and audiovisual creation.
Because of the project size and subsidy rate (60%) every partner must contribute to financing WP Project Coordination in proportion to their effective subsidies.

WP Survey Recycling

Utilize the survey harmonization and recycling tools developed in music to be available for film, television, photography, and book publishing users.
Extend harmonized question banks, and remove interoperability and semantic barriers to reuse data from previous audience and policy surveys for these CCSIs.
Subsidize the initial costs in use to transfer from non-reusable market research to reusable, collaborative market research.

WP Heritage Reuse

Utilize the best practices from music archives, film archives, and private photography archives to remove copyright law, ethical, interoperability, and semantic barriers to mix archival/heritage and new content in music, film, and photography (including in books.)
Create a special-purpose record label and audiovisual distributor that specializes in difficult, out-of-commerce/archival/commercial derivative work distribution on global streaming platforms.
Build a best practice for the legal and ethical public performance of derivative works that are made from archival/heritage (which were not deposited with the intent to be commercially used or widely circulated) and new creations.

WP AI & Big Data That Works For Everyone

Utilize the best practices from data feminism, music, and film distribution of niche, marginalized content, and create a general framework that reduces inequalities created by lower data representation (of women, small countries, small languages) that result in new injustice on algorithmic platforms. See publication.
Build new music, film, and photography information services that reduce the data imbalances, and make small language (for example, Estonian) or historically underrepresented (for example, female artists) more likely to be recommended by AI-driven algorithmic platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, or Amazon.
Create open source solutions and open knowledge that enables small, independent music, documentary, photography, and book publishers to build audiences, and monetize content with big data and AI algorithms that work for everyone, not only male artists, English language content, and mainstream works.

Potential partners

Creative enterprises with good YouTube (+Vimeo and other) distribution and rights management track record.
Market research, particularly survey based in film and television.
Services for private collections/collectors.

Who are we?

In 90 secs: conceptual introduction

⚙️/ subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan.

LineCheck, Milano, IT

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 15:15:00 +0000

Table of Contents

Green Deal, this time for real

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex will participate in the panel about on Thursday, November the 24th at 3.15pm about environment and sustainability in the music industry and introduce Eviota, our simplified, connected financial and sustainability reporting tool.

At LineCheck X, you can find out more about our projects

You can get a free, total value chain based sustainability report. (Get in touch with us before 18 November)
We will demonstrate how you can eradicate packaging waste from your music events by making the packaging edible.
And you can find out how we are trying to find where energy is going down the sewage, literally, with Thermowatt and the Green Deal Data Observatory.

Beta test our sustainabilitiy reporting tool

We are looking for beta testers for our simplified sustainability report that is made from your trial balance. We sign and NDA about your accounting data if you test with us, and you can test with older data, too. Beta testing is free.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

The European Commission estimates that the cost of connecting sustainability and finanical reporting will cost on average €10,000 for corporations. We want to bring down the voluntary reporting costs for MSMEs below €500 euro to benefit from green loans, green insurance and other green financing.
It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollutions, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. We are also showcasing harmonized gender inequality data collection with our other project (see below.)

Digital Music Observatory: survive in the music business without a data engineer

⚙️/ subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan. If you are there, please leave a 👍, too :)

We will introduce Surveyharmonies, a survey recycling and survey harmonization tool. You can participate in our international gender bias survey in January 2023. Our team will also participate in the KeyChange Creative Lab on Friday, 25 November at 11.00.
You can learn about our Listen Local project, which helps local music ecosystems remain visible on global platforms.
We will offer you a cup of tea or coffee in an edible cup.

Harmonizing surveys on gender (in)equaliaty

You can create better surveys with less cost: you only need to ask the information, or change of information, that is not included in our harmonized datasets. Shorter, better questionnaires, smaller samples sizes, huge cost savings.
When you make questionnaire-based research, you immediately get a history (the same question asked years ago) and an international comparison (the same question asked in other countries.)
Often you do not even have to pay for the survey, because somebody else has already made a similar taxpayer funded research and we can just get the data for you.

Survey harmonization is a powerful research tool to increase the usability of questionnaire-based empirical research. Read more on our blog.

Eviota for Music

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 09:40:00 +0100

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

Creating connected sustainability reports has many advantages.

It shows consumers, donors, and buyers that the company cares for sustainable growth.
The organization can ask for grants related to increasing sustainability.
In the EU, the company will be eligible for cheaper green loans, green insurance, and green investments.
Large corporations, including music event donors, may require their supply chain to produce credible sustainability metrics.

There are some difficulties that we want to overcome in this project.

Connected financial and sustainability reports are complex, they require plenty of data, and mandatory only for ’large’ corporations. Just like small companies can make ‘simplified tax returns’ and ‘simplified financial reports’, we aim to create a less complex and cheap simplified, connected financial and sustainability report.
Due to the high complexity, they take a long time to create and are costly: the European Commission estimates their total cost at €10,000.

Eviota for Music was supported by a micogrant of the MusicAIRE program with the key strategic objective of Support sustainability actions that contribute to a green, digital and just and resilient recovery of the European music ecosystem.

Grant Agreement nº: d82c23a8-2012-4b44-b04c-c561b00bcc0f

Table of Contents

Our approach

To reduce the data need, we only take into consideration cost/income groups that meet the financial materiality treshold, i.e. 3% of your total costs or total business-to-business sales.

Why the trial balance?

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We do not need the ledger, only the annual account summaries of revenues and expenses.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity. This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

How does it work?

We use the trial balance (see examples of a trial balance), because that is a standard document that your accountant has about all your purchases and all your sales.

the annual (simplified) balance sheet
the annual (simplified) profit and loss statement

Process: From your data to the final report

We sign a non-disclosure agreement.
You send us your trial balance.
We create a first draft of your carbon footprint. We categorize your suppliers (costs) and buyers (income) into 64 categories for which we have reliable data. See methodology below.
Most of our calculations are made with iotables, our scientific and open source software. We rely on open data from the Green Deal Data Observatory, which in turn processes reliable data of Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency in readily usable format. The use of open source reporting tools and open data helps keep our costs low.
We set up a short call with you and your accountant to make some clarifications.
We provide you the final report.

What is the report?

The making of an NFD is not mandatory for small- and medium sized companies and NGOs that usually produce simplified financial reports.
It is two paragraphs of factual text, accompanies with a table and chart about how much greenhouse gases (or other pollutants) are created by your activities.
A sustainability report is a first step to factual sustainability management and avoiding greenwashing. When you know factually how your activities (including purchases from your suppliers) cause greenhouse gas emissions (or contribute to the gender paygap), you can devise steps to reduce your negative impact, or increase your positive impact.
We work with reliable expert advice so that you can act in a credible way, and make credible promises to your customers, your audience, your donors, granting agencies, bank, insurance, or investors.

Methodology

We follow the CPA classification for your suppliers and corporate buyers. See Statistical Classification of Products by Activity Some categories, like B MINING AND QUARRYING are aggregated, i.e. we cannot make a distintion among various mining activities. In service industries this is not required.
We use the same data for comparators that states use to monitor the Paris Accord. We use the categories of the System of National Accounts, which is harmonized on the level of the EU and the level of the UN. In 2022 we only work with EU and candidate countries that follow the EU version, and we’ll adjust our software in 2023 for the rest of the world.
Our sustainability methodology is based on the Global GHG Accounting & Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry.
We follow the EFRAG’s Proposals for a Relevant and Dynamic EU Sustainability Reporting Standard Setting (pdf download) because this will be the basis of future, mandatory reporting standards in Europe.
We will help small music organizations in their sustainability reporting, where detail data and reporting standards are only available for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Music Eviota project is supported by the MusicAIRE.

Open collaboration

Why are we developing this service?

Requirements for connecting financial and sustainability reporting.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollution, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. Our previous research shows that particularly the live music industry that needs a large workforce, suffers from underuse of, and discrimination of female workers in various technical and even managerial roles. Our system will be able to flag risks of gender paygap and related issues in the entire value chain and of course, provide good benchmarks for internal activities.

Growing interest for ESG in select countries.

Future plans: Social Sustainability and Anti-Bribary

MusicAIRE Green Recovery in the Music Sector

Co-funded by the European Union

Eviota for Music

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 09:40:00 +0100

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

Creating connected sustainability reports has many advantages.

It shows consumers, donors, and buyers that the company cares for sustainable growth.
The organization can ask for grants related to increasing sustainability.
In the EU, the company will be eligible for cheaper green loans, green insurance, and green investments.
Large corporations, including music event donors, may require their supply chain to produce credible sustainability metrics.

There are some difficulties that we want to overcome in this project.

Connected financial and sustainability reports are complex, they require plenty of data, and mandatory only for ’large’ corporations. Just like small companies can make ‘simplified tax returns’ and ‘simplified financial reports’, we aim to create a less complex and cheap simplified, connected financial and sustainability report.
Due to the high complexity, they take a long time to create and are costly: the European Commission estimates their total cost at €10,000.

Table of Contents

Our approach

To reduce the data need, we only take into consideration cost/income groups that meet the financial materiality treshold, i.e. 3% of your total costs or total business-to-business sales.

Why the trial balance?

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We do not need the ledger, only the annual account summaries of revenues and expenses.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity. This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

How does it work?

We use the trial balance (see examples of a trial balance), because that is a standard document that your accountant has about all your purchases and all your sales.

the annual (simplified) balance sheet
the annual (simplified) profit and loss statement

Process: From your data to the final report

We sign a non-disclosure agreement.
You send us your trial balance.
We create a first draft of your carbon footprint. We categorize your suppliers (costs) and buyers (income) into 64 categories for which we have reliable data. See methodology below.
Most of our calculations are made with iotables, our scientific and open source software. We rely on open data from the Green Deal Data Observatory, which in turn processes reliable data of Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency in readily usable format. The use of open source reporting tools and open data helps keep our costs low.
We set up a short call with you and your accountant to make some clarifications.
We provide you the final report.

What is the report?

The making of an NFD is not mandatory for small- and medium sized companies and NGOs that usually produce simplified financial reports.
It is two paragraphs of factual text, accompanies with a table and chart about how much greenhouse gases (or other pollutants) are created by your activities.
A sustainability report is a first step to factual sustainability management and avoiding greenwashing. When you know factually how your activities (including purchases from your suppliers) cause greenhouse gas emissions (or contribute to the gender paygap), you can devise steps to reduce your negative impact, or increase your positive impact.
We work with reliable expert advice so that you can act in a credible way, and make credible promises to your customers, your audience, your donors, granting agencies, bank, insurance, or investors.

Methodology

We follow the CPA classification for your suppliers and corporate buyers. See Statistical Classification of Products by Activity Some categories, like B MINING AND QUARRYING are aggregated, i.e. we cannot make a distintion among various mining activities. In service industries this is not required.
We use the same data for comparators that states use to monitor the Paris Accord. We use the categories of the System of National Accounts, which is harmonized on the level of the EU and the level of the UN. In 2022 we only work with EU and candidate countries that follow the EU version, and we’ll adjust our software in 2023 for the rest of the world.
Our sustainability methodology is based on the Global GHG Accounting & Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry.
We follow the EFRAG’s Proposals for a Relevant and Dynamic EU Sustainability Reporting Standard Setting (pdf download) because this will be the basis of future, mandatory reporting standards in Europe.
We will help small music organizations in their sustainability reporting, where detail data and reporting standards are only available for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Music Eviota project is supported by the MusicAIRE.

Open collaboration

Why are we developing this service?

Requirements for connecting financial and sustainability reporting.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollution, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. Our previous research shows that particularly the live music industry that needs a large workforce, suffers from underuse of, and discrimination of female workers in various technical and even managerial roles. Our system will be able to flag risks of gender paygap and related issues in the entire value chain and of course, provide good benchmarks for internal activities.

Growing interest for ESG in select countries.

Future plans: Social Sustainability and Anti-Bribary

MusicAIRE Green Recovery in the Music Sector

Co-funded by the European Union

Music Eviota

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 09:40:00 +0100

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

Creating connected sustainability reports has many advantages.

It shows consumers, donors, and buyers that the company cares for sustainable growth.
The organization can ask for grants related to increasing sustainability.
In the EU, the company will be eligible for cheaper green loans, green insurance, and green investments.
Large corporations, including music event donors, may require their supply chain to produce credible sustainability metrics.

There are some difficulties that we want to overcome in this project.

Connected financial and sustainability reports are complex, they require plenty of data, and mandatory only for ’large’ corporations. Just like small companies can make ‘simplified tax returns’ and ‘simplified financial reports’, we aim to create a less complex and cheap simplified, connected financial and sustainability report.
Due to the high complexity, they take a long time to create and are costly: the European Commission estimates their total cost at €10,000.

Table of Contents

Our approach

To reduce the data need, we only take into consideration cost/income groups that meet the financial materiality treshold, i.e. 3% of your total costs or total business-to-business sales.

Why the trial balance?

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We do not need the ledger, only the annual account summaries of revenues and expenses.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity. This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

How does it work?

We use the trial balance (see examples of a trial balance), because that is a standard document that your accountant has about all your purchases and all your sales.

the annual (simplified) balance sheet
the annual (simplified) profit and loss statement

Process: From your data to the final report

We sign a non-disclosure agreement.
You send us your trial balance.
We create a first draft of your carbon footprint. We categorize your suppliers (costs) and buyers (income) into 64 categories for which we have reliable data. See methodology below.
Most of our calculations are made with iotables, our scientific and open source software. We rely on open data from the Green Deal Data Observatory, which in turn processes reliable data of Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency in readily usable format. The use of open source reporting tools and open data helps keep our costs low.
We set up a short call with you and your accountant to make some clarifications.
We provide you the final report.

What is the report?

The making of an NFD is not mandatory for small- and medium sized companies and NGOs that usually produce simplified financial reports.
It is two paragraphs of factual text, accompanies with a table and chart about how much greenhouse gases (or other pollutants) are created by your activities.
A sustainability report is a first step to factual sustainability management and avoiding greenwashing. When you know factually how your activities (including purchases from your suppliers) cause greenhouse gas emissions (or contribute to the gender paygap), you can devise steps to reduce your negative impact, or increase your positive impact.
We work with reliable expert advice so that you can act in a credible way, and make credible promises to your customers, your audience, your donors, granting agencies, bank, insurance, or investors.

Methodology

We follow the CPA classification for your suppliers and corporate buyers. See Statistical Classification of Products by Activity Some categories, like B MINING AND QUARRYING are aggregated, i.e. we cannot make a distintion among various mining activities. In service industries this is not required.
We use the same data for comparators that states use to monitor the Paris Accord. We use the categories of the System of National Accounts, which is harmonized on the level of the EU and the level of the UN. In 2022 we only work with EU and candidate countries that follow the EU version, and we’ll adjust our software in 2023 for the rest of the world.
Our sustainability methodology is based on the Global GHG Accounting & Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry.
We follow the EFRAG’s Proposals for a Relevant and Dynamic EU Sustainability Reporting Standard Setting (pdf download) because this will be the basis of future, mandatory reporting standards in Europe.
We will help small music organizations in their sustainability reporting, where detail data and reporting standards are only available for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Music Eviota project is supported by the MusicAIRE.

Open collaboration

Why are we developing this service?

Requirements for connecting financial and sustainability reporting.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollution, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. Our previous research shows that particularly the live music industry that needs a large workforce, suffers from underuse of, and discrimination of female workers in various technical and even managerial roles. Our system will be able to flag risks of gender paygap and related issues in the entire value chain and of course, provide good benchmarks for internal activities.

Growing interest for ESG in select countries.

Future plans: Social Sustainability and Anti-Bribary

MusicAIRE Green Recovery in the Music Sector

Co-funded by the European Union

Music Eviota

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 09:40:00 +0100

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

Creating connected sustainability reports has many advantages.

It shows consumers, donors, and buyers that the company cares for sustainable growth.
The organization can ask for grants related to increasing sustainability.
In the EU, the company will be eligible for cheaper green loans, green insurance, and green investments.
Large corporations, including music event donors, may require their supply chain to produce credible sustainability metrics.

There are some difficulties that we want to overcome in this project.

Connected financial and sustainability reports are complex, they require plenty of data, and mandatory only for ’large’ corporations. Just like small companies can make ‘simplified tax returns’ and ‘simplified financial reports’, we aim to create a less complex and cheap simplified, connected financial and sustainability report.
Due to the high complexity, they take a long time to create and are costly: the European Commission estimates their total cost at €10,000.

Table of Contents

Our approach

To reduce the data need, we only take into consideration cost/income groups that meet the financial materiality treshold, i.e. 3% of your total costs or total business-to-business sales.

Why the trial balance?

No extra management time is needed: it is already recorded by every company’s accountant. The general ledger is recorded by your accountant. We do not need the ledger, only the annual account summaries of revenues and expenses.
It is not subjective. It states exactly what you were spending on.
It is more or less standardized across Europe—and almost all countries of the world, with the exception of the U.S. and some other countries.
We need to use the same working document that your accountant uses to maintain an important objectivity criterion: connectivity. This way your annual report will be consistent, if you say in the financial part that you spend 1000 euro on energy, then we will calculate the greenhouse gas emissions based on KWh volume of the the energy that cost you 1000 euros.

How does it work?

We use the trial balance (see examples of a trial balance), because that is a standard document that your accountant has about all your purchases and all your sales.

the annual (simplified) balance sheet
the annual (simplified) profit and loss statement

Process: From your data to the final report

We sign a non-disclosure agreement.
You send us your trial balance.
We create a first draft of your carbon footprint. We categorize your suppliers (costs) and buyers (income) into 64 categories for which we have reliable data. See methodology below.
Most of our calculations are made with iotables, our scientific and open source software. We rely on open data from the Green Deal Data Observatory, which in turn processes reliable data of Eurostat and the European Environmental Agency in readily usable format. The use of open source reporting tools and open data helps keep our costs low.
We set up a short call with you and your accountant to make some clarifications.
We provide you the final report.

What is the report?

The making of an NFD is not mandatory for small- and medium sized companies and NGOs that usually produce simplified financial reports.
It is two paragraphs of factual text, accompanies with a table and chart about how much greenhouse gases (or other pollutants) are created by your activities.
A sustainability report is a first step to factual sustainability management and avoiding greenwashing. When you know factually how your activities (including purchases from your suppliers) cause greenhouse gas emissions (or contribute to the gender paygap), you can devise steps to reduce your negative impact, or increase your positive impact.
We work with reliable expert advice so that you can act in a credible way, and make credible promises to your customers, your audience, your donors, granting agencies, bank, insurance, or investors.

Methodology

We follow the CPA classification for your suppliers and corporate buyers. See Statistical Classification of Products by Activity Some categories, like B MINING AND QUARRYING are aggregated, i.e. we cannot make a distintion among various mining activities. In service industries this is not required.
We use the same data for comparators that states use to monitor the Paris Accord. We use the categories of the System of National Accounts, which is harmonized on the level of the EU and the level of the UN. In 2022 we only work with EU and candidate countries that follow the EU version, and we’ll adjust our software in 2023 for the rest of the world.
Our sustainability methodology is based on the Global GHG Accounting & Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry.
We follow the EFRAG’s Proposals for a Relevant and Dynamic EU Sustainability Reporting Standard Setting (pdf download) because this will be the basis of future, mandatory reporting standards in Europe.
We will help small music organizations in their sustainability reporting, where detail data and reporting standards are only available for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Music Eviota project is supported by the MusicAIRE.

Open collaboration

Why are we developing this service?

Requirements for connecting financial and sustainability reporting.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollution, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. Our previous research shows that particularly the live music industry that needs a large workforce, suffers from underuse of, and discrimination of female workers in various technical and even managerial roles. Our system will be able to flag risks of gender paygap and related issues in the entire value chain and of course, provide good benchmarks for internal activities.

Growing interest for ESG in select countries.

Future plans: Social Sustainability and Anti-Bribary

MusicAIRE Green Recovery in the Music Sector

Co-funded by the European Union

Identifying Roadblocks to Net Zero Legislation

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In our use case we are merging data about Europe’s coal regions, harmonized surveys about the acceptance of climate policies, and socio-economic data. While the work starts out from existing European research, our retroharmonize survey harmonization solution, our regions sub-national boundary harmonization solution and iotables allows us to connect open data and open knowledge from other coal regions of the world, for example, from the Appalachian economy.

Policy Context

The Just Transition Platform aims to assist EU countries and regions to unlock the support available through the Just Transition Mechanism. It builds on and expands the work of the existing Initiative for Coal Regions in Transition, which already supports fossil fuel producing regions across the EU in achieving a just transition through tailored, needs-oriented assistance and capacity-building.

The Initiative has a secretariat that is co-run by Ecorys, Climate Strategies, ICLEI Europe, and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate. While the initiative is an EU project, it cooperates with other similar initiatives, for example, with the Coalfield Development social enterprise in the Appalachian economy.

Data Sources

Coal regions: Our starting point is the EU coal regions: opportunities and challenges ahead publication Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service. This publication maps Europe’s coal dependent energy and transport infrastructure, and regions that depend on coal-related jobs.
Harmonized Survey Data: The dataset of the Eurobarometer 91.3 (April 2019) harmonized survey. Our transition policy variable is the four-level agreement with the statement More public financial support should be given to the transition to clean energies even if it means subsidies to fossil fuels should be reduced (EN) and Davantage de soutien financier public devrait être donné à la transition vers les énergies propres même si cela signifie que les subventions aux énergies fossiles devraient être réduites (FR) which is then translated to the language use of all participating country.
Environmental Variables: We used data on pm and SO2 polution measured by participating stations in the European Environmental Agency’s monitoring program. The station locations were mapped by Milos to the NUTS sub-national regions.

Exploratory Data Analysis

Our coal-dependency dummy variable is base on the policy document Coal regions in transition.

readRDS(file.path("data", "coal_regions.rds"))

## # A tibble: 253 x 5
##    country_code_is~ region_nuts_nam~ region_nuts_cod~ coal_region is_coal_region
##    <chr>            <fct>            <chr>            <chr>                <dbl>
##  1 BE               Brussels hoofds~ BE10             <NA>                     0
##  2 BE               Liege            BE33             <NA>                     0
##  3 BE               Brabant Wallon   BE31             <NA>                     0
##  4 BE               Antwerpen        BE21             <NA>                     0
##  5 BE               Limburg [BE]     BE22             <NA>                     0
##  6 BE               Oost-Vlaanderen  BE23             <NA>                     0
##  7 BE               Vlaams Brabant   BE24             <NA>                     0
##  8 BE               West-Vlaanderen  BE25             <NA>                     0
##  9 BE               Hainaut          BE32             <NA>                     0
## 10 BE               Namur            BE35             <NA>                     0
## # ... with 243 more rows

Our exploratory data analysis shows that respondent in 2019, agreement with the policy measure significantly differed among EU member states and regions.

transition_policy <- eb19_raw %>%
  rowid_to_column() %>%
  mutate ( transition_policy = normalize_text(transition_policy)) %>%
  fastDummies::dummy_cols(select_columns = 'transition_policy') %>%
  mutate ( transition_policy_agree = case_when(
    transition_policy_totally_agree + transition_policy_tend_to_agree > 0 ~ 1, 
    TRUE ~ 0
  )) %>%
  mutate ( transition_policy_disagree = case_when(
    transition_policy_totally_disagree + transition_policy_tend_to_disagree > 0 ~ 1, 
    TRUE ~ 0
  )) 

eb19_df  <- transition_policy %>% 
  left_join ( air_pollutants, by = 'region_nuts_codes' ) %>%
  mutate ( is_poland = ifelse ( country_code == "PL", 1, 0))

Preliminary Results

Significantly more people agree where

there are more polutants
who are younger
where people are more educated

Significantly less people agree

in rural areas
where more people are older
where more people are less educated
in less polluted areas
in coal regions

A simple model run:

c("transition_policy_totally_agree" , "pm10", "so2", "age_exact", "is_highly_educated" , "is_rural")

## [1] "transition_policy_totally_agree" "pm10"                           
## [3] "so2"                             "age_exact"                      
## [5] "is_highly_educated"              "is_rural"

summary( glm ( transition_policy_totally_agree ~ pm10 + so2 + 
                 age_exact +
                 is_highly_educated + is_rural + is_coal_region +
                 country_code, 
               data = eb19_df, 
               family = binomial ))

## 
## Call:
## glm(formula = transition_policy_totally_agree ~ pm10 + so2 + 
##     age_exact + is_highly_educated + is_rural + is_coal_region + 
##     country_code, family = binomial, data = eb19_df)
## 
## Deviance Residuals: 
##     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max  
## -1.7690  -1.0253  -0.8165   1.2264   1.9085  
## 
## Coefficients:
##                      Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept)        -0.1975096  0.0921551  -2.143 0.032095 *  
## pm10                0.0068505  0.0017445   3.927 8.60e-05 ***
## so2                 0.1381994  0.0405867   3.405 0.000662 ***
## age_exact          -0.0075018  0.0007873  -9.529  < 2e-16 ***
## is_highly_educated  0.2953905  0.0311127   9.494  < 2e-16 ***
## is_rural           -0.1277983  0.0313321  -4.079 4.53e-05 ***
## is_coal_region     -0.2624005  0.0640233  -4.099 4.16e-05 ***
## country_codeBE     -0.3290891  0.0916117  -3.592 0.000328 ***
## country_codeBG     -0.6470116  0.1125114  -5.751 8.89e-09 ***
## country_codeCY      0.8471483  0.1273306   6.653 2.87e-11 ***
## country_codeCZ     -0.5754008  0.0965974  -5.957 2.57e-09 ***
## country_codeDE      0.0106430  0.0856322   0.124 0.901088    
## country_codeDK      0.0577724  0.0925391   0.624 0.532429    
## country_codeEE     -0.8041188  0.0989047  -8.130 4.28e-16 ***
## country_codeES      1.1266903  0.0941495  11.967  < 2e-16 ***
## country_codeFI     -0.2617501  0.0946837  -2.764 0.005702 ** 
## country_codeFR      0.0130239  0.1639339   0.079 0.936678    
## country_codeGB      0.2454631  0.0891845   2.752 0.005918 ** 
## country_codeGR      0.2169278  0.1209199   1.794 0.072816 .  
## country_codeHR     -0.1632727  0.1001563  -1.630 0.103064    
## country_codeHU      0.5779928  0.1020987   5.661 1.50e-08 ***
## country_codeIT     -0.1427249  0.0940144  -1.518 0.128985    
## country_codeLU     -0.3111627  0.1140426  -2.728 0.006363 ** 
## country_codeLV     -0.6246590  0.0963526  -6.483 8.99e-11 ***
## country_codeMT      0.3303363  0.1228611   2.689 0.007173 ** 
## country_codeNL      0.1707080  0.0902189   1.892 0.058470 .  
## country_codePL     -0.2843198  0.1228657  -2.314 0.020664 *  
## country_codePT      0.1447295  0.0899079   1.610 0.107452    
## country_codeRO     -0.0479674  0.0930433  -0.516 0.606177    
## country_codeSE      0.4865939  0.0922486   5.275 1.33e-07 ***
## country_codeSK     -0.2427307  0.0964652  -2.516 0.011861 *  
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## (Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)
## 
##     Null deviance: 30568  on 22401  degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 29313  on 22371  degrees of freedom
##   (5253 observations deleted due to missingness)
## AIC: 29375
## 
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 4

summary( glm ( transition_policy_agree ~ pm10 + so2 + age_exact +
                 is_highly_educated + is_rural, 
               data = eb19_df, 
               family = binomial ))

## 
## Call:
## glm(formula = transition_policy_agree ~ pm10 + so2 + age_exact + 
##     is_highly_educated + is_rural, family = binomial, data = eb19_df)
## 
## Deviance Residuals: 
##     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max  
## -2.1970   0.5035   0.5803   0.6495   0.8465  
## 
## Coefficients:
##                     Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept)         1.807823   0.079297  22.798  < 2e-16 ***
## pm10                0.005092   0.001239   4.108 3.99e-05 ***
## so2                 0.003274   0.051410   0.064  0.94922    
## age_exact          -0.009781   0.000988  -9.900  < 2e-16 ***
## is_highly_educated  0.396743   0.039735   9.985  < 2e-16 ***
## is_rural           -0.107448   0.037953  -2.831  0.00464 ** 
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## (Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)
## 
##     Null deviance: 20488  on 22401  degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 20250  on 22396  degrees of freedom
##   (5253 observations deleted due to missingness)
## AIC: 20262
## 
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 4

Next Steps

After careful documentation, we will very soon publish all the processed, clean datasets on the EU Zenodo repository with clear digital object identification and versioning.
We will seek contact with the Secretariat of the Initiative for Coal Regions in Transition to process all the data annexes in the EU coal regions: opportunities and challenges ahead report.
With our volunteers we want to include coal regions from the United States, Latin America, Australia, Africa first – because we have harmonized survey results – and gradually add the rest of the world.
We will ask political scientists and policy researchers to interpret our findings.