The "Power BI and Data Analytics for Enviros" meetup group is all about sharing tips, tricks and hacks for analysing, visualising and communicating environmental data. The purpose of this blog is to summarise the key take-aways from the sessions, to help with sharing knowledge, empowering others and creating a strong data culture across our community.

October 2025: Session summary

Investments in projects that aim to capture and store carbon in vegetation and soils are often based on potential cost-effectiveness. That approach can overlook the people and communities who live where these projects happen – the very people whose participation and support determine whether initiatives succeed. To bring social and economic contexts and impacts into the frame, the CSIRO team developed a Social Intel for Sustainable Investment Decisions dashboard with DiscoverEI to spark dialogue with partners around the social and economic data that could help inform investment decisions.

This session drew on a new open access paper published in Sustainability Science (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-025-01729-0), that shows how social measures could help inform carbon abatement investment decisions. The paper describes work from a partnership between a project team in CSIRO’s Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform and the Queensland Government’s Land Restoration Fund.

Throughout the session, the wider project was discussed including how the Power BI development journey came together from initial mock-ups, to seeking reliable data sources, to the front-end visualisation design and functionality required. Power BI techniques such as exploring various mapping visuals, report page tooltips and the pros / cons of some of the conditional formatting elements are all covered.

October 2025: Guest speaker Dr. Nikki Dumbrell

Nikki Dumbrell is an economist in CSIRO Agriculture and Food (CSIRO link HERE). Nikki’s research is guided by the question: how do we manage natural resources to achieve sustainability in a time of significant environmental change? Some of Nikki’s current work is improving the use of socio-economic information in sustainable agriculture investments, policies, and markets.

Sign up now for the meetup here: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/powerbi4enviros - and if you have ideas for a future session then please let us know at info@discoverei.com .

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Do you want to learn how to create interactive dashboards to assess environmental risks, analyse spatial and temporal trends in your datasets, and design infographic style environmental scorecards to visually communicate your findings to stakeholders and decision makers?

Our two-day Power BI training course is designed specifically for Environmental Professionals, to up-skill you quickly through hands-on exercises using examples with practical applications from across the environmental industry. We provide this course online, in-person group sessions, or customised in-house training for your team. Places are limited (max 8 participants per class) so secure your spot today!