Opportunities for Focused Collaboration: The Open Data Community and Climate

How global open data organizations are trying to fit into the climate change discussions

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

Over the past three years, Open Data Charter (ODC) has worked on opening up data for climate action. We created and implemented the Open Up Guide on Climate Action alongside the World Resources Institute (WRI), and have participated in some of the global roundtable discussions about the topic, including The United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Digital Convoy and the C20 Climate & development working group. At a time when core grants are moving away from the open data agenda, the creation of synergies and collaborative projects is increasingly needed to make sure that openness of data remains at the heart of global challenges, be it climate action, climate justice, or resilience.

With Luminate’s support, we conducted a research project to understand how open data global organizations are trying to fit into the climate change discussion. The objective was to bring together stakeholders to discuss and understand why open data for climate action is important, how the open data community can help the well-established climate change community in their advocacy agenda, and how projects from across both sides of the aisle can contribute to a much broader strategy to add collective value. We wanted to make sure that through this, we can help bring together the efforts amongst open data advocates in the climate agenda.

Methodology

The first aim was to define what the current thematic focus and priority areas of climate-related open data organizations are before identifying types of products and platforms that are more established as well as listingdata gaps that are still not covered in their agendas. The second aim was to analyze the open data ecosystem (community) working towards open data for climate action, as it is important to know their agendas including their vision, prospective activities, and their ideas on what added value they could bring to the common work agenda.

Through interviews and a discussion with organizations working on open data and climate initiatives, insights and elements were collected to understand why open data is important for climate action, how the open data community can help the well-established climate change community in their advocacy goals, and how projects from across both sides of the aisle can contribute to a much broader strategy to add collective value. In addition, we have developed a rapid literature review that includes different research reports, studies and documents related to initiatives on open data for climate change to identify the main thematic areas being covered and data gaps that are still not covered.

Contribution of open data to climate action

From the review of studies in the previous section as well as interviews, an agreement on possible contributions of open data in the climate action agenda can be summarized into the following aspects: Increase access to reliable climate data and data governance; more citizen friendly information for advocacy efforts; supporting climate data policy agendas; bringing new voices into the climate action conversation.

Challenges and opportunities

We based the discussion and recommendations on the insights from interviews and discussions with participants from organizations working on open data and environmental issues. The main challenges and opportunities identified during this process revolved around five major themes: 1) User capacity to understand and analyze climate data; 2) communication of data; 3) data standardization and interoperability; 4) data ownership; and 5) new groups that can innovate with climate data.

Key findings

Accessible and usable data are critical to addressing the climate crisis and while gaps in knowledge exist, how data is reused and how often, comes down to who can participate in the process. Based on the information collected in this report some of the recommendations and main findings can be organized into the following aspects that are essential for moving forward to motivate collaboration efforts among the open data communities and climate action initiatives.

• Learning and training, as related to the previous topic on user capacity to understand and analyze climate data. Building data literacy on climate data is key to reducing knowledge gaps related to what data is available, where to find it, and how to use it.
• From the analysis of data standardization and interoperability and data ownership, more technical work is needed. For instance, the development of international and regional standards for climate data sharing is just in its initial stages, and further research on terminology, methodologies and other interoperability issues need to be addressed to ensure safe reporting by everyone.
• Likewise, there is a need for assessment of data sectoral organizations’ demands and needs in regard to privacy protection, sovereignty and national security, formats, quality, sources, and other technical domains that are still not clear in many subsectors of climate data.
• New opportunities for funders to invest in initiatives that work with climate data, especially in the development of both government engagement and climate data communication initiatives that include new stakeholders (as mentioned in the actors along the data value chain for climate action) that are working with grassroots organizations and sectors that can also contribute to open climate data, such as academics and the private sector.
• The Private sector needs to be on board with opening up climate data. Production and sharing of data from private industries is moving slowly, given that bigger polluters have access to information related to climate change, there is a need for transparency and accountability that goes further than just greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reporting. Besides GHG emission reporting it is a priority to generate linkage strategies to standardise and include relevant data generated by the private sector in the opening plans. We can follow up on these findings and reflections by trying to understand the added value that a diversity of actors can generate to produce new services and products. In order to do that, we need to understand what a dynamic governance model that manages to involve a diversity of actors from different sectors in the production and use processes of climate data should look like, especially in private sector data generation.
• The inclusion of marginalized communities, new groups that can innovate with climate data and network building are needed for climate action. A common feeling is to identify gaps and needs across the field and gather resources. Another is on how they can gather case studies and lessons learnt to share across networks. Besides, the Global South organizations should be included in the global agendas as a priority in the coming years given the fact that reliance is needed in those regions that are not prepared for climate change adaptation. Policy and advocacy initiatives need communication strategies and tools for the use of open data in climate action. For instance, leveraging open data measurement tools to inform progress and hold government commitments to account (to include a focus on policy) as well as new data governance initiatives that include the private sector can be initiatives to promote more advocacy and policy for climate action.

The way forward

Here are some practical ideas to continue working in this path:

• There is a need to understand how to maximize the impact of open data in various specific sectors related to climate action, for instance: road traffic, air and water quality, energy production and consumption, waste management, pollution impacts on natural resources and environmental impacts from industries, among other sub-sectors.
• Coordination among organisations working on open data, a portion of them is already mapped in this report to pursue, but further research is required to analyze the demand and supply for climate data. For instance, further research could include standardization and interoperability of regional climate data, common standards on urban data for climate action and marginalized communities and climate resilience.
• Other initiatives may include the creation of an Open Climate Data Group that can work towards building a common agenda in areas where funders are already supporting different groups around the world on open data and climate action initiatives. From the Open Data Charter perspective, the open-up guide is an initial step to having a common standard to share climate data, which is needed to advance the publishing of open climate data.
• From a point of view from the Global South, we need to investigate what national and regional open climate data policies already exist. Since many countries do not have yet an open data policy, let alone specifically for the environmental sector, it is a must to move forward. Regional efforts already exist regarding creating new legal frameworks such as the Escazu Agreement in Latin America, which promotes access and transparency about environmental information in governments and the protection of environmental activists.

We hope that this work will help strengthen the 2023 agenda as it sheds light on the possible collaborations among open data organizations for climate change. As a follow-up to this project we will definitely be keeping this conversation alive so that we can deepen a collaborative agenda for open data and climate justice.

Download the full report.

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