The White House launched the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP) and Joint Declaration on Harnessing the Data Revolution for Climate Resilience to use open data to combat climate change.
PREP is made up of Federal agencies and industry members who will identify where information is needed, increase data access and usability, and create an open-source platform for climate resilience.
PREP seeks to engage communities in ongoing conversations about climate data and reduce the barriers that inhibit access to data.
PREP released a beta platform to begin work on the open-source infrastructure of the data sharing system. The program allows communities to select and visualize initial Federal data sets and other relevant data. PREP includes data on historical and projected changes in air temperature, precipitation change, and streamflow.
In the next year, PREP will move to the pilot phase of the program, which will include a customizable dashboard and the ability to choose what data to include.
PREP stems from the work of the Climate Data Initiative (CDI), released in 2014, which worked to increase access to climate data worldwide.
The Department of Interior, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration pledged to provide data to PREP and give additional support.
U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) will provide technical support for the program and coordinate between government and industry partners to enable quick decision-making processes.
The joint declaration is made up of nine private organizations including Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and IBM, and 14 nations including the United States, that will focus on collaboration in the fight against climate change by using and sharing data.
The joint declaration will aim to design data systems to be used for climate resilience, support open-data sharing, create timely and user-friendly open source platforms, increase collaboration to bring together data from multiple sources, maintain best practices for access to data, and encourage complementary initiatives.
