The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have published a new report calling for weather, climate and hydrological information data sets to be made open and freely available as digital public goods (DPGs).
Analysis of the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Risk Report has shown that the impact of climate and environment-related disasters are higher for vulnerable systems with limited adaptive capacity and fall disproportionately on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
According to the DPGA, the restricted availability and dissemination of high-quality data can hinder the decision making process and stifle technical innovation, including the development of digital solutions with the potential to address critical climate change adaptation needs. Therefore the DPGA, ITU and WMO co-authored a report calling for such data sets to be made open and freely available as digital public goods. This was driven by the efforts of the DPGA’s Climate Change Adaptation Community of Practice, which focused on DPGs with the potential to impact climate and weather services and convened in 2021.
To showcase the positive outcomes of open data sets, the report also highlights eight digital public goods that provide open data sets or utilize open data sets to help climate change adaptation efforts relevant to weather and climate services. The DPGs include MET Norway Weather API; Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform; Weather and Crop Calendar; VIPS; Water Productivity Portal (WaPOR); Platform for Real-time Impact and Situation Monitoring (PRISM); Climate Information Platform (CIP); and Open Foris Collect.
The partnership hopes that the report will help open more data sets, assist in the discovery of existing open data sets, and build confidence in utilizing these data sets for climate change adaptation efforts.
To view the call to action, click here.
