Pacific Gas & Electric Company – Gaby Seltzer – 2023

Goals

PG&E’s Climate Resilience Team conducted robust community engagement as part of a company-wide Climate Vulnerability Assessment. This data, which demonstrates how climate hazards are impacting vulnerable communities, was not formatted accessibly for internal use.

The team enlisted Gaby Seltzer to identify internal use cases and reformat the data so the concerns and priorities of climate-vulnerable communities could inform future company engagement with these communities.

Solutions

Gaby approached the challenge in phases:

1. They identified use cases for community resilience data and appropriate data-sharing platforms by conducting more than 20 research interviews with internal teams and external advisors. Through these interviews, Gaby also discovered common ‘pain points’ around community engagement and data management methodologies.
2. They transformed the data into two interactive datasets, and created guidance documents to help teams meaningfully and securely access data for their use cases.
3. They designed a detailed recommendation for an internal policy on community research methods, outlined short- and medium-term steps for implementation, and socialized the recommendation through presentations and workshops.

Potential Impact

Reformatting data into interactive and accessible datasets will enable the priorities of climate-vulnerable communities to provide ongoing value, driving socially equitable adaptation investments. This formatting provides a model for data sharing that could be utilized across future community research projects.

If implemented, the community research methodology would reduce internal inefficiencies, build employee confidence, and strengthen trust between PG&E and the climate-vulnerable communities it serves.