About PlanetWatch

Planet-Scale Governance & Policy Tracker

PlanetWatch tracks planet-related control — the regulations, policies, trade rules, environmental governance, and institutional decisions that shape how humanity manages the planet. Every day, institutions around the world issue rulings, publish analyses, and set frameworks that determine who controls what, under what rules, and at what cost. PlanetWatch brings these signals together in one place.

We map the systems of control over planetary resources, trade, the environment, and development. From carbon border adjustments and critical-mineral supply chains to fisheries governance and financial-regulation rollbacks, our feed surfaces the decisions that matter — and puts them on a map so you can see the geography of power as it shifts.

Each item is geo-located to the country, region, or institution it concerns, then plotted on an interactive global map. Filter by source, topic, or region to explore the institutional landscape that governs the planet — or watch the feed live to see new policy developments as they break.

Philosophy

Planetary-scale governance is increasingly fragmented across hundreds of bodies — some formal (WTO trade panels, IMF Article IV consultations, World Bank lending conditionalities), others informal (think-tank policy briefs, CFR task-force reports, Chatham House principles). The result is a fog of institutional output that few have the time or context to navigate.

PlanetWatch exists to cut through that fog. We believe that transparency about who governs what — and how — is a prerequisite for accountability. By aggregating, tagging, and mapping institutional output, we give researchers, journalists, policymakers, and engaged citizens a single window into the architecture of planetary control.

We are nonpartisan, source-agnostic within our chosen institutional set, and focused entirely on the what and where of governance — not advocacy. Our goal is to make the invisible infrastructure of planetary management visible, explorable, and understandable at a glance.

Sources

The map is built from four live feeds, refreshed every six hours. This is the actual wiring, not an aspiration — each layer maps to exactly one feed (they are separate from the institutional research library described further down):

Environmental Policy

BBC News — Science & Environment feed. Items are kept only when they concern environmental governance: regulation, treaty, emissions, funding or enforcement decisions. Wildlife, weather-forecast and astronomy items are filtered out.

Policy Feed

BBC News — Politics feed. UK and international political and legislative output.

Trade & Economics

BBC News — Business feed. Kept when the item is trade or economic policy: tariffs, trade deals, regulation, central-bank decisions, sanctions. Company results, market moves and personal-finance items are filtered out.

UN & Global Governance

UN News — all-topics feed. Institutional output from the United Nations system. Human-rights, impunity and rule-of-law items are queued for UltraVires, where they belong.

Research Library Sources

Alongside the map, PlanetWatch keeps a daily research library of institutional output — six publishers, one JSON record per item with its publisher, date and a link to the original. How each publisher is read is stated plainly, because it is not the same for all six:

Each publisher is read through a window of its newest entries, de-duplicated by id against everything already held, and the run records what each one offered — entries seen, items added, newest item date, any error — in /library/source_status.json, next to the library itself (/library/items.json). That record exists so a source which stops answering is visible rather than silent.

Selection & Curation

A layer name is a promise about what is inside it, so every item is checked against the layer's stated mission before it is plotted. The rule has two stages and is deliberately conservative:

Nothing is destroyed. Excluded records are preserved with their reason in a quarantine file beside the pipeline, and the rules themselves are published in the repository (shared/curation.json), so any decision can be reviewed, audited or reversed. Each layer's data file carries a curation block recording exactly how many records were excluded and why. Re-syndicated copies of the same story are de-duplicated on the headline, so one story cannot occupy dozens of map markers.

Features

Technology

Leaflet Python RSS Feedparser ViewerEngine GH Actions

Contact

[email protected]