Many countries of southern Africa face inadequate infrastructure to archive and disseminate timely and reliable data and information to aid the development of efficient management strategies under conditions of long-term environmental change and climate change.
How to provide open solutions?
In the wake of the current and future projected climate and socio-economic changes, the establishment of the Open Access Data Centre (OADC) of SASSCAL aims to support climate change adaptation by making data, information and knowledge openly available.
The objectives of the OADC are
- harvesting data, information and services from the SASSCAL research portfolio and from collaborating initiatives and partners,
- putting in place data storage systems to ensure that products are safe-guarded,
- putting in place an openly-accessible online platform, referred to as the SASSCAL Data and Information Portal, and
- putting in place platforms to further ensure the creation of knowledge products and services based on the user requirements of the stakeholder community.
- generating, compiling, analysing and processing relevant data on climate, water cycle, soil, biodiversity, ecosystem goods and services, land use-related energy demographic and other socio-economic parameters for user-oriented decision support
- providing a platform and infrastructure for collaborating initiatives/programmes
facilitating, analysing and implementing regional models and modelling results