This article is written by Joel Gurin and Muneeb Malik. Joel is President of the nonprofit Center for Open Data Enterprise, where Muneeb is an Atlas Corps Fellow.

  • The problem: Governments and their partners around the world need better data to take action for climate adaptation and resilience.
  • Why it matters: Data on a wide range of local factors, together with global climate data, can make the path to effective action faster and more effective.
  • The solution: A new tool, the Climate DART, provides a framework for governments and their partners to identify and use more than 50 kinds of essential data and develop new collaborations.

For decades, scientists have collected, published and analysed data that enables us to predict the course of climate change. Now, as the pace of climate change outstrips those predictions, there is an urgent need to use data for climate action as well as climate knowledge. Countries and cities around the world need data to help them adapt to long-term climate risks, become resilient to climate hazards and improve their capacity for managing sudden climate disasters.

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The challenge is daunting. Climate change can have many dramatic impacts – including wildfires, floods, extreme heat events, drought and extreme weather – and those impacts affect many essential systems. A government that wants to make its city more resilient to floods, for example, might begin by assessing the probability that it will see flooding from extreme weather, sea level rise and other factors. But that same government will also have to assess its housing infrastructure, transportation systems, energy sources, emergency services and many other factors to understand where the city is most vulnerable to flooding and to improve its ability to withstand climate-related floods.

A new tool to help governments with climate data

To provide a starting point, our organisation, the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE), has developed a new tool to help governments and their partners identify the kinds of data that may be most useful for climate action. The Climate Data for Adaptation and Resilience Typology (DART), which has just been published, describes more than 50 types of essential data in an easily searchable, sortable format. Anyone can now access and use a brief description of the Climate DART, a User Guide and the DART itself under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The Climate DART draws on several existing data-focused initiatives, including the UN Statistical Division Global Set of Climate Change Statistics and Indicators, the Sendai Framework and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to support climate action around the world. It covers over a dozen focus areas relevant to climate, including:

  • Climate change adaptation policies and plan
  • Climate change public awareness
  • Ecosystems and biodiversity
  • Energy
  • Food security
  • Freshwater resources
  • Health systems
  • Heat and temperature
  • Infrastructure
  • Land and agriculture
  • Population
  • Risk management and disaster preparedness
  • Waste management
  • Weather and climate monitoring

A collaborative resource and tool

The Climate DART is designed to foster collaboration and action by national and local governments, NGOs, communities, development organisations and academics, enabling them to work together to find data-driven solutions to the climate crisis. The Climate DART:

  • Identifies and prioritises data resources needed for climate risk assessment, adaptation and resilience based on accepted global models and practices.
  • Serves as a resource for national and subnational governments and their stakeholders to identify key factors, measures and metrics.
  • Simplifies international frameworks to prioritise focus areas, drivers and relevant factors for understanding and acting on climate risk.

We hope that the Climate DART will be both a valuable resource in its own right and a tool for developing new insights, strategies and collaborations for climate adaptation and resilience. The Climate DART is part of a larger project being led by PARIS21 and conducted in collaboration with Open Data Watch (ODW), with support from the Hewlett Foundation. ODW and PARIS21 will build on the DART to develop tools for assessing data availability across countries and within individual countries in depth.

CODE welcomes ideas for collaboration and further development of the Climate DART at contact@odenterprise.org. As the climate crisis intensifies in the years ahead, better, more actionable data will be one of the world’s critical resources for charting a survivable and sustainable future.

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(Image credit: Unsplash)