Open data
The archive as open data
Every published story and profile, as structured data you can download, analyse and reuse. No private contributor information is ever included.
36stories
33countries
9legacy profiles
181cited sources
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Version 2026-10-09. Updated automatically whenever a story is published or corrected.
Licence and citation
Our written summaries and the dataset are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Photographs keep their own licences, shown under each image. Please cite:
Amool, S. H. (ed.) (2026). We Speak Sustainability: a living archive of grassroots sustainability action [Dataset, version 2026-10-09]. https://wespeaksustainability.com/data/
Data dictionary
| id | Permanent identifier, also the page address |
|---|---|
| actor_type | individual, group, community or organisation |
| location | Town or community; never a home address |
| latitude / longitude | Town centre, rounded to two decimals for safety |
| started_year | Year the action began, from sources (conflicts explained on the story page) |
| scale | household to international |
| problem | One of 13 problems in our taxonomy |
| topics | Semicolon-separated tags from a controlled list of 33 topics |
| sdgs | Only goals that clearly apply |
| evidence_level | verified, documented, self-reported or insufficient (see methodology) |
| copy_this_difficulty / cost | Editorial judgement for someone replicating the idea; cost is qualitative |
| has_documented_setbacks | Whether sources describe something that did not work |
| number_of_sources | Count of cited sources |
Limitations
- The archive is small and not a random sample. It reflects what has been documented in reliable sources, which over-represents award winners and English-language coverage.
- Impact figures are not included as fields, because most are self-reported or measured in incompatible ways. They are attributed in each story's text.
- Coordinates are deliberately imprecise.
Read the full methodology or see what the data shows so far in Insights.