fossabot/climate-watch

Climate Watch: Data for Climate Action

Climate Watch

Table of Contents:

• Domain description
• Local Setup
• Environment variables
• Modules
• API

Domain description

• UNFCCC - United nations framework climate change convention - Organization of parties

• INDC: Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) is a term used under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that all countries that signed the UNFCCC were asked to publish in the lead up to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris

• NDC: Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) Doument that the country issue towards the UNFCCC convention

• SDG: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 "Global Goals" with 169 targets. These goals and targets cover a broad range of sustainable development issues.

• GHG - Greenhouse gas emissions

• GDP - Gross Domestic Product

• Category: (in Emission Pathways Section) Different models related to the ESP data. i.e models, scenarios and indicators

• CO2e - Equivalent CO2 emissions regardless of the gas

• SDG - Sustainable development goals - Goals and targets created by the UN

• IPCC version == GWP (Global Warming Potential) - Versions of the data created for UNFCCC

• ANNEX 1 and non-ANNEX 2 (UNFCCC) - Different groups of parties of the convention

Local setup

System dependencies

• postgres 9.6

Installing application dependencies

yarn run js:install

and then

yarn run rails:install

These will satisfy both the frontend and backend's dependency requirements.

Setting up the Rails environment

Copy the sample .env.sample file to .env and modify it as needed to fit the project's settings. At the very least you'll need to have the POSTGRES_URL and SHARED_POSTGRES_URL env variable.

POSTGRES_URL=postgresql://postgres@localhost/climate-watch_development
SHARED_POSTGRES_URL=postgresql://postgres@localhost/climate-watch-shared_development

Setting up the database

yarn run rails:db:create

and then

yarn run rails:db:migrate

These will create the development database and then run the database migration tasks.

Launching The App

You'll need to run both the rails server and the webpack server, which will be used internally by rails. Run, separately:

yarn run rails:server

and

yarn run js:server

Point your browser to http://localhost:3000/. Ta-da!

Launching the app with docker

docker-compose up Ta-da!

Frontend Architectural choices

The fronted uses react, redux and react-router. There are some peculiarities in the architectural choices that we will outline in this section.

Router

The router version used in the project is v.4.1.1.

• routes are defined as a data-structure instead of using jsx inside the routes.js file.
• Instead of connecting the routes to the reducer via middleware we decided to use withRouter HOC instead, which means whenever you need access to the router information you will have to wrap your component with withRouter.

Environment variables

These are some of the environment variables that we need: CW_API: Base Climate Watch API ESP_API: Emission Pathways API GFW_API: Global Forest Watch API CW_FILES_PREFIX: Prefix for the files on s3 USER_SURVEY_SPREADSHEET_URL: URL for the script to the contact survey

FEATURE_POP_UP: Pop up shown entering the site POP_UP: Name of the temporary pop up to be displayed FEATURE_KEY_VISUALIZATIONS: Activate key visualizations page on commitments menu

Modules

Perhaps the bigger peculiarity is the module based architecture. What a module architecture means is that all the elements that are part of a component are contained inside the same directory. That includes not only Component and Container, but also styles, reducers and actions.

Typical module structure:

├── my-module/
│   ├── components/
│   ├── my-module-actions.js
│   ├── my-module-component.jsx
│   ├── my-module-reducers.js
│   ├── my-module-styles.scss
│   └── my-module.js

Module entry point

The module entry point, named as the directory containing the module exports every element of the module individually and acts as container (as in container component) if needed.

Module Component

The module's Component (as in presentational component) only contains the view in jsx. Every state related or action concern will be taken care of in the container in such way that the component will receive it via props. The Component never handles logic.

Module styles

For all the application styles we are using css-modules, this allows for local scope (BEM for free) and theming/styles combination.

If the module we are writing is supposed to be reusable, the styles contained within the module only refer to the particular functioning of that module. No aesthetic definition belongs in the module styles.

Theming

Whenever the module will need to be mounted in the application and given some style, the module will provide the means to be customized using react-css-themr and the parent will be responsible for styling the component with the app specific styles. This library provides a HOC in which we can wrap our component or container and it will take care of merging the passed theme into the local styles.

State management and connecting Modules

Once we are using the mentioned module architecture we have to gather all the local actions and reducers and glue them together so redux can use them. For asynchronous actions we use redux-thunk.

Module Actions

Actions inside a module are created with redux-actions createActions and exported individually. For Thunk actions a slim wrapper around createActions is used, this allows us to pass a thunk as the second argument giving us full control of what actions to dispatch on init success or fail.

Module Reducers

Reducers inside a module are simple pure functions, no switch case is even present. The reducers file exports an object which keys are the actions constants and the value is the reducer that will react to that dispatched action.

The exported actions are used for the keys since redux-actions returns the action constant when calling the .toString() method in the action creator.

App Actions

The application actions file is free to import/export every module's actions individually or merge them into a big object containing all the actions.

App Reducers

In the app reducers we will import all module's reducers and bind them to a key in the store using a handleActions wrapper. This wrapper uses redux-actions's handleActions and glues all the individual reducers together to the matching actions.

API

NDC-SDG Linkages

Overview page

• GET /api/v1/ndcs/sdgs_overview will return a response with the following format:

[
  {
    "id": 35,
    "locations": {
      "AFG": {
        numbers:
          [
            "1.1",
            "1.5"
          ],
        document_type: 'ndc',
        language: 'EN'
      }
      "AGO": {
        numbers:
          [
            "1.1"
          ],
        document_type: 'indc',
        language: 'EN'
      }
    },
    "number": "1",
    "targets": [
      "1.1",
      "1.2",
      "1.3",
      "1.4",
      "1.5",
      "1.a",
      "1.b"
    ]
  }
]

Where:

• id: is the Sustainable Development Goal id;
• number: is the goal number;
• locations: is an array with all the locations that have linkages to targets of this goal;
• targets: is the list of targets available for a given SDG goal;

WB (World Bank) Extra Country Data

• GET /api/v1/wb_extra/ will return a response with the following format:

[
  'AUS':
    [
      {
          "population": 30739250,
          "gdp": 13834300571,
          "year": 1961,
          ...
      },
      {
          "population": 31023366,
          "gdp": 16138545209,
          "year": 1962.
          ...
      }, ...
    ],
  'ANG':
    ...
]

Where:

• population: is the total population for the year and the iso code of the country;

• gdp: is the gross domestic product for the year and the iso code of the country;

• year: year

• GET /api/v1/wb_extra/:iso will return a response with the following

extra params: startYear: min limit to the year. If its not included will get the closest min year endYear: min limit to the year. If its not included will get the closest max year

format:

[
    {
        "population": 30739250,
        "gdp": 13834300571,
        "year": 1961
    },
    {
        "population": 31023366,
        "gdp": 16138545209,
        "year": 1962
    }, ...
]

Release

To release using a fork of zeit release to generate the changelog automatically with all of the PR included since the last release just run:

(Be sure you have all of your branches sync first, and merge the changes that you want in master locally before running the command)

npx release 'major' | 'minor' | 'patch'

and push to master!

License