The Climate Connectivity Hub

Addressing information fragementation

As the impacts of climate change increase, new urgency has surfaced in efforts to adopt measures that can help contain temperature rise, limit the risks of disasters, and adapt to unavoidable climate-related impacts – and, where possible, to find insights into ways that have the potential to help accomplish all three of these aims.

People everywhere are searching for accurate, up-to-date information in a world that is awash with information – and misinformation and disinformation. The state of knowledge is always advancing, updating understanding of what is likely to be effective, what is unlikely to work, and what requires more research. The world’s vast stores of knowledge are fragmented, with pieces on a website here or a platform there. This situation only reinforces the prevailing absence of coordination and the tendency for people and organizations in one field to work in a given silo, cordoned off from people and organizations in different fields that might offer new perspectives and insights.

How can people working on climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction find the information needed to collectively improve understanding of measures that do or do not work? How can they tap into the information they need – which they may not even know exists? How can they be sure that such information is up to date? Accurate and trustworthy? Applicable to their situations? How can they learn from one another’s work, across discplines and geographies? And, importantly, how can they do this quickly, to accelerate on-the-ground actions?  

Leveraging new technological tools and data

The Climate Connectivity Hub is a unique search-and-discovery tool that seeks to address these needs. The hub, originally conceived in 2018,  is designed to connect data, resources, people and organizations to address and solve part of this coordination and collaboration puzzle. It brings together data from global resources and initiatives that work in historically disparate fields:  climate adaptation, climate mitigation, and disaster risk reduction. 

The newest iteration of the hub leverages both key databases and new and increasingly powerful technological tools. This means that the hub can help uncover relevant, policy-oriented insights from the latest projects and case studies from key sources. Among them are:

• CORDIS, the database of European Union (EU) research and development projects;
• Prevention Web, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) knowledge-sharing platform
• Climate-ADAPT, the EU portal for climate adaptation information.

The hub’s expanded reach is made possible by a new taxonomy, devised to bridge the diverging terminologies used in decision-making on these three distinct areas of expertise (climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction) at all levels, worldwide.  The taxonomy is open access and designed in a way to make it easy to use in climate research, policy, and practice.

This underpinning taxonomy now provides contextual information for more than 1,000 concepts by building on definitions from authoritative sources: 

• the glossary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• the Hazard Information Profiles assembled by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the International Science Council. 

These  data from different global sources and initiatives into a single place following robust semantic data standards and using foundational FAIR data principles (for findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability). 

The hub combines emerging artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) innovation with proven semantic standards, such the simply knowledge organization system (SKOS). This provides a baseline common language and river interoperability across disaster risk redution and climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience work. 

Searching on the hub

A search in the hub can: 

• generate a dynamic and interactive online visualization of the landscape of relevant organizations and activities that connect climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction knowledge networks.
• create a cluster of information by sector, decision focus, geographical scope and risk  ̶  with an emphasis on key messages and lessons learned.
• guide users to content that helps them find relevant evidence, expertise, tools and methods, and good practice insights, and to make contact with organizations and peers at work on related issues.

The aim is to facilitate a shared understanding of language and terminology used across different domains and platforms and specialities ̶ and, utlimately, to provide a place to connect people who can use this information to quickly make more informed decisions that best apply to their own situations.

Providing a video introduction

This video explains more about the tool and the ongoing work to advance its capabilities.

Links to EU projects 

Work on the Climate Connectivity Hub began in 2018 as part of the EU project, the PLAtform for Climate Adaptation and Risk reduction (PLACARD), which aimed to establish a recognized, online destination for dialogue, knowledge exchange and collaboration between the climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction communities.

The capacities of the hub are expanding through work in three EU Horizon Europe projects:

• The MAIA (Maximising impact and accessibility of European climate research) project – This project is reviewing existing taxonomies and vocabularies to explore how different fields can add value to one another and fill knowledge gaps. This is intended to help users to discover more information and organizations relevant to their work.
• The DIRECTED (Disaster resilience for extreme climate events through improved data accessibility, communication and risk governance) project – This project is developing an open-source taxonomy informed by conversations with local stakeholders in real-world lab settings. The project undertaking work to co-explore local perceptions of risk and governance to provide insights into the types of terminology used to describe risk and resilience. amd the perspectives arising across different locations and contexts.
• The FAIR to Adapt to Climate Change (FAIR2Adapt) project – This project seeks to tackle the fragmentation and inaccessibility of climate data and resources. The project seeks to facilitate the integration and sharing of findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) information and open data.

“The increasing ability to harness data and to repurpose it in innovative, visually powerful ways provides new avenues for learning from existing initiatives, and for accelerating the bridging of science to action”, said SEI Senior Research Fellow Sukaina Bharwani, who leads the hub project.

Want to know more about the basics? Watch this video from its original launch.