The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), World Resources Institute (WRI), U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and a network of partners have launched the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP) to help communities, companies and investors use data to improve climate resilience planning.

Risks from global climate change impacts like more frequent and extreme storms, floods, and droughts set to increase 50 percent over the next 12 years,

In the US alone, nearly 1.9 million homes, valued at $882 billion, are at risk of flooding from sea level rise, while approximately 60,000 miles of U.S. coastal roads already exposed to flooding from coastal storms and high waves.

Communities, companies, and investors making long-term infrastructure decisions increasingly need to know how climate change could impact them, require relevant data and guidance to plan for climate risks. However, while government agencies and other public bodies often have a vast supply of data, updated frequently from satellites and other sources, it is without a direct connection to the users who need it. Similarly governments often don’t know the specific data needs of planners – meaning information may be discarded without knowing its value.

Climate data - often inaccessible, trapped in silos, or too technical to use

Climate data is often inaccessible, trapped in silos, or too technical to use. Government and private sector planners typically have to rely on static reports or sort through hundreds of sources with conflicting or confusing data, often without guidance on what data exists, which data to use for projections, where data comes from, or if it is outdated.

Open-source, technology-neutral platform to meet needs of all users

PREP is seeking to bridge the gap by launching a beta platform, www.prepdata.org, to provide local governments with dynamic data, climate reports, and projections directly sourced from NASA, NOAA, and others as they become available.

The platform will be open-source and technology agnostic to suit the needs of all users. PREP is aiming to enable users to pull information relevant to their community into data-driven dashboards that can better guide climate adaption decisions.

Government partners like NASA, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ) and DOI will provide global climate data and modelling, private technology partners will provide additional data and engineering support, and civil society groups will help engage users to understand their needs.

WRI is the non-government partnership coordinator, focused on developing the beta PREP platform, which is powered by Resource Watch, an open architecture data system.

PREP collaborating partners working on platform development include WRI, NASA, NOAA, Amazon Web Services, CARTO, Descartes Labs, Earth Knowledge, Esri, Google Cloud Platform and Google Earth Engine.

PREP to enable data-driven approach to build climate resilience

PREP, which emerged out of the Climate Data Initiative, is seeking to enable a data-driven approach to building climate resilience by:

• Engaging communities to identify data needs.
• Identifying and reducing the barriers to access, contribute, and use data and information products for climate resilience.
• Developing an open-source platform to enhance access to and usability of climate-relevant data and information.

Data availability alone is not enough – must be translated into actionable information

PREP is aimed at translating data into actionable information to help inform planning decisions for people on the ground and providing access to the necessary tools and functionality communities need – data availability alone is not enough.

The initiative will help to provide data translators with easy access to usable data they need in order to develop the decision-support tools needed to inform and build climate resilience.

"PREP is about reaching not just across the federal government, but across the public and private sectors, seeking out the best talent, the best capabilities to turn Earth science data into accessible information,” said Dr. Ellen Stofan, Chief Scientist, NASA. “And nothing could be more critical than making this country, and countries around the world, more resilient to the effects of climate change."

PREP to scale up post-launch with communities around the globe

The PREP beta platform is launching with both domestic and international collaborators, including the U.S. National Climate Assessment team.  PREP plans to scale up after launch with testing in other communities around the globe over the next 12 months.

Sonoma County in the US is one of PREP’s domestic collaborators:

“Sonoma County is in the midst of experiencing climate change and that means higher temperatures, more extreme rainfall events and prolonged droughts. PREP has helped our community work together and integrate climate risk data into one central online tool that is available to our whole community,” said Efren Carrillo, Chairman of the Sonoma County Water Agency. “Before PREP, this data had no single home; instead it was fragmented amongst our government agencies and community organizations. Our urban planners, farmers and community now have the ability to plan for the future with this critical PREP climate resiliency tool.”

Ability to create customized climate risk dashboards to be fully ready and publicly available for any user within a  year

PREP will also seek to expand data transparency so planners know if data comes from governments or commercial entities, clarifying data sources from the start to distinguish which data are most useful. Users will be able to share their plans, learn from others, and pull government data from multiple global datasets for specific locations. PREP will also promote data publication standards – especially from government entities – ensuring published data formats and data types produced by agencies are useful for long-term planning.

The ability to create customized climate risk dashboards is expected to be fully ready and publicly available for any user within one year. In the interim, the partnership will continually add datasets and case studies as available.

According to Javier de la Torre, Chief Executive Officer, CARTO, one of PREP’s partners, the universalization of data and digital tools in the area of climate change will be key to enabling and empowering the millions of eyes needed to overcome its challenges.

 Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist, Microsoft added:

“Decision-makers today are facing increasingly complex challenges related to climate change. By making critical data both more accessible and rapidly available, we can accelerate the development of tools, such as PREP, that harness that data to empower communities to make smarter decisions. “

“Microsoft is enthusiastic about joining with government and private industry partners to tap into the power of data and technology to improve urban resiliency, risk management challenges and help address climate change.”

For more information visit www.prepdata.org