In April 2022, I began working for the City of Kirkland as a paid climate justice intern. During this time, our work primarily consisted of doing research, outreach, presentations, and content design to forward the actions of Kirkland’s Sustainability Master Plan (SMP), targeting residents, potential partners, local businesses, and neighborhood associations.

As I learned more about the internship and the work I was doing, I explored the SMP, particularly the action summary at the end of the document. This included 197 actions the city would be taking over the next several years and 19 metrics that broke down their intricacies, such as impact (environment, community, etc.), partners, and other factors. This information was displayed in a stagnant PDF table that offered no navigable freedom.

I saw an opportunity to test my data science skills with an abnormal problem set and took it!

First, I started by quantifying all the data, which required a tremendous amount of formatting and restructuring (PDF to Excel conversion did not like me). Then, with all the data properly structured, I began to imagine what the ideal dashboard would consist of.

This dashboard is meant to make the city’s plans more transparent and accessible, so my goal was to consider the perspectives of its users (residents, businesses, land owners, tax-payers, inspired municipalities, environmental activists, and everybody in between!).

Power BI is a beautiful tool in many ways, particularly how it allows you to identify trends almost ANYWHERE. While you can click on the options in the lower right to add filters, you can also click on each slice in the donut chart to filter by category or each column by action or attribute. Going further, by holding ctrl while clicking filters, you can select several of the same filter.

Example:

By holding ctrl while clicking all the green bars in the bottom left, you filter by the most impactful actions in the environmentally related categories instead of just by GHG emissions, energy reduction, or environmental quality. The same can be done for the other color groupings or categories! Explore and Enjoy!

Note: Hover over each actions column to see the action’s description

Note: Power BI embedded dashboards are not optimized for mobile usage, please use a larger device to explore the dashboard!