One of the many areas of action required to deal with the global climate crisis is building climate resilience—the ability to prepare for, recover from, and adapt to climate change impacts. Open data portals—front-facing web applications designed to make data more discoverable and easier to share and interpret—are vital to ensuring stakeholders get the high-quality, up-to-date data necessary for more effective climate resilience measures.

Let’s examine how open data portals can help government, business, and civil society by providing data for better informed decision-making and action around climate mitigation and resilience.

This blog post was co-authored by Alex Gostev, Link Digital’s Product and Growth Marketing Lead

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Climate data: a complex, growing ecosystem

Open data is information collected, produced, and paid for by public bodies and made available to be used, re-used, and shared in readable formats.

In much the same way that the COVID-19 pandemic turbocharged the increasing use of open data in scientific research and government decision-making, the climate crisis is driving a growing demand for quality open climate data from a wide spectrum of stakeholders. These include governments seeking to make better policy, civil society groups wanting to take meaningful climate action of their own and hold polluters to account for what they do or do not do, and financial institutions and regulators wanting to conduct better climate risk assessments and improve reporting and disclosure.

As the United Nations Environment Programme notes:

Beyond understanding the actual impacts of climate change on different aspects, which include the social and economic implications that have already been realised, it is crucial to have climate data of sufficient availability, quality, timeliness, and comparability. These data enable the evaluation of climate risks and opportunities as well as their potential impacts. Climate data are therefore indispensable for the development of effective strategies and policies for climate mitigation and adaptation.[1]

But the climate data ecosystem is complex. For example, while many national governments report emissions data under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, not all the data is open or easily accessible, especially by those who do not attend global or regional climate change talks.

In addition to emissions data, climate data collected and reported on by governments includes agricultural productivity and food security, human and ecosystem health, flood risk, renewable energy and carbon offset information, etc. This data is gathered from numerous sources, including citizen-generated data, universities and research institutions, and the private sector.

And like all data, climate data can be of variable quality, and there can be gaps in its reliability, comparability, and timeliness. It is often presented and stored in different formats, fragmented across agencies, geographic and legal jurisdictions, and not made interoperable formats. And, even when it is easily accessible, it can be very complex and difficult to understand and analyse.

What role can open data portals play?

Open data portals can make climate data more easily shareable and encourage impactful reuse. This fosters transparency and collaboration, as well as facilitating faster evidence-based action to build climate resilience. They can do so in several ways.

Improved data discoverability

Open data portals support users to search for and discover data assets based on various criteria, such as keywords and tags, across different platforms and domains. This makes it easier to find and reuse the datasets they need for their work. It empowers applications and those who use them to register, update, and refine datasets, improving data quality and ensuring that any research or analysis that uses the data is trustworthy and accurate.

By centralising and organising the collection and dissemination of climate data from multiple sources, open data portals can act as a single point of truth for stakeholders seeking data to inform their research, policy development, or action. They can enable state and local governments to collect, manage, and publish localised climate data, which is essential for developing more targeted solutions. They also provide a wide range of tools to visualise and analyse the data through maps, charts, and dashboards, making it easier to comprehend.

Improved data quality

In addition to increasing access, open data portals can help standardise and improve the quality of climate data. Open data portals can implement measures to improve metadata quality to enhance the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of data. Portals encourage the use of common formats, services, and vocabularies, such as Data Catalogue Vocabulary (DCAT), which is designed to facilitate interoperability between data published on the web. Open data portals also provide tools to keep data up-to-date, accurate and mechanisms to incorporate user feedback systems, allowing users to report errors.

Increased Collaboration

In addition to acting as central aggregators to guide and improve data collection, open data portals enable more effective collaboration by empowering researchers working on similar projects or topics to connect and share resources. This can help harmonise the fragmented and often incompatible nature of existing climate data sources.

The user management features of many open data portals enable the creation of collaborative spaces in which researchers and stakeholders from different institutions and across geographic jurisdictions can access and work together on shared datasets. It allows them as a group to contribute different data to a shared project – for example, combining government climate measurements with university research findings – refine datasets and metadata, and explore, independently corroborate, and build upon each other’s work. The ability to pool technical tools and expertise to avoid duplicating efforts results in more comprehensive, robust research outcomes.

Some of the ways in which the features of open data portals can directly help to build climate mitigation include:

  • Improving climate modelling and predicting. This helps governments and communities take measures to adapt to rapidly changing climatic conditions. Some climate modelling is fed by open datasets and their results have begun to be published openly.
  • Enhancing food security and protecting livelihoods by allowing open data on global/national weather patterns, rainfall, temperatures, etc, to be combined with locally captured data, allow farmers to adapt their agricultural practices.
  • The analysis of data on extreme weather events makes it possible to design strategies to mitigate their impact or enable faster and more effective disaster responses.

Open data portals can also function as a form of affordable digital infrastructure for lower-income countries that are often the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change but lack the resources to set up the sophisticated technological systems required to collect, monitor, and interpret data related to it.

Building climate resilience: open data portals in action

Link Digital is a global expert in the design and building of open data portals. Portals we have built to help organisations have real world impact in terms of climate resilience include:

The Canadian Watershed Information Network

Managed by University of Manitoba’s Centre for Earth Observation Science, the Canadian Watershed Information Network collects and manages a large array of climate data, including spatial data, analyses and shares it with researchers. In 2020, Link Digital overhauled an existing platform to allow for greater data storage capability and enable researchers to tell more complex stories about the data in their work. The job involved installing new visualisation tools, customising metadata templates to improve search efficiency, and adding user permissions to provide data sovereignty to Indigenous groups to give them granular control over their data. The changes enable researchers across institutions to collaborate on climate data analysis and share findings for analysis from a hyperlocal to global scale.

Read more about Link Digital’s work on the Canadian Watershed Information Network.

The Columbia Basin Water Hub

The Columbia Basin Water Hub is the open data portal developed by Living Lakes Canada for freshwater data within the Columbia Basin, in response to the need for a more coordinated water monitoring effort in the region. Their science-based programs are aligned with Canadian Provincial and Federal monitoring protocols and range from groundwater, lake, stream, and wetland monitoring to foreshore health assessments, biomonitoring for aquatic assessment and restoration, and water database development and management, and include analysing data on the impact of climate change.

Read more about Link Digital’s work on the Columbia Basin Water Hub.

Pacific Data Hub

Overseen by the Pacific Community (SPC), the principal scientific and technical organisation for the Pacific, the Pacific Data Hub was launched in late 2020 and serves as a gateway to the most comprehensive data collection of relevance to the 22 Pacific Island nations and territories. Designed to tackle the fact that Pacific related data and statistics are hard to locate, fragmented, incomplete and held in multiple geographic locations and by various stakeholders. the Hub provides a reliable, easily accessible, up to date source of quality data on a range of issues, including climate change. This includes the first detailed estimates of the coastal proximity of populations in 22 pacific island countries and territories. The data, a collaborative project between SPC, University of Wollongong and the not for profit research organisation WorldFish, is vital data in terms of assessing vulnerability to natural disasters, economic and livelihood issues, and mitigating the impacts of climate change.

Read more about Link Digital’s work on the Pacific Data Hub here.

Sharing and Enabling Environmental Data (SEED) portal

The SEED portal was launched by the New South Wales Government in 2016 to provide a centralised place where the community, industry, consultants, NGO’s, researchers and government can come to search for, access, contribute and share NSW environmental data. As part of changes to make the SEED portal more interactive, Link Digital upgraded the site and turned into a multi-hub service with several integrated themed hub environments, such as water, natural hazards and the Natural Capital Accounting, etc. These hubs provide a single point of truth for the dissemination of high quality, standardised environmental data, and enable organisations to engage with their stakeholders around data available on SEED, including on issues related to climate resilience.

Read more about Link Digital’s work on the SEED portal here.

Want to build an open data portal?

Building your climate data portal shouldn’t be a hassle. Contact us and one of our data portal experts will be in touch.

[1] United Nations Environment Programme (2024). The Climate Data Challenge: The Critical Role of Open-Source and Neutral Data Platforms, Geneva, 2.