An initiative by Future Earth and the World Resource Institute is making climate data accessible, understandable, and actionable for adaptation decision-makers and practitioners.
The Climate Preparedness Challenge
A crucial challenge in building resilience to climate change is the lack of access to useful, timely and credible data and information. Adaptation and resilience practitioners face a confusing and fragmented landscape of platforms and tools, and lack guidance on how to understand and manage climate risk using the data available. This problem is exacerbated by a lack of feedback mechanisms to help data providers understand user needs. PREP addresses these challenges by opening the lines of communication between data providers and users–and by providing easy access to a curated set of data and tools, which is driven by user input.
Together with over 30 different partners from a wide range of industries, and some of the biggest names in research and technology – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, ESRI, NASA, and NOAA – PREP have developed and launched the peer-to-peer, open source and map-based platform, PREPdata.
PREPdata allows users to access and visualize spatial data reflecting past and future climate, as well as the physical and socioeconomic landscape for climate adaptation and resilience planning. It is a flexible tool for climate adaptation planning, designed to address many of the gaps and challenges adaptation practitioners face.
Distinguishing elements of PREP data:
- A visual, map-based platform that is user-friendly and customized to different contexts and skill levels.
- Active curation of datasets focused on climate resilience, streamlining the process of accessing and navigating to relevant data.
- A commitment to global coverage, with an emphasis on increasing access to datasets for the Global South, and support for applications across different scales and geographies.
- A user-needs based strategy for platform development, utilizing the knowledge and network of the partners and platform users to enable continuous improvement.
PREP has worked with two states in India, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand, to visualize local data and co-produce sector specific dashboards for the states. In addition, the Divecha Divecha Center for Climate Change hosted a PREP meeting gathering data providers, researchers, decision makers, and nongovernmental organizations in south Asia to discuss and build partnerships about data and tools for climate adaptation and resilience planning.