Summary Brief: Finding Open Climate Data

View the PDF print version of this Summary Brief
View the Pilot Assessment Analysis

Why do we need open climate data?

Open data about climate change and its impacts are of vital importance to planners in low- and middle-income countries, which are often more vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change due to limited resources, infrastructure, and adaptive capacities. Access to reliable and comprehensive data on climate change is crucial for effective policy-making, planning, and implementation of adaptation and mitigation strategies. Open data promote transparency, accountability, and international collaboration, fostering knowledge sharing and interoperability of climate change data across different parts of the statistical system. Open data are therefore at the heart of successful efforts to build national and global systems that monitor and react to threats from climate change. With data that are freely accessible, people in low- and middle-income countries can actively participate in global efforts to combat climate change, contribute to collective knowledge, and strive towards a sustainable and resilient future.

The Open Climate Data Template (OCDT)

Open Data Watch (ODW), has developed an Open Climate Data Template (OCDT) that enables stakeholders of the national statistical system, such as national statistical offices (NSOs), to quickly understand what data on climate change, adaptation, and resilience are available and how accessible they are. This sheds light on the experience of users seeking to access climate data and helps countries evaluate their own capacity to produce and disseminate climate change data by examining the availability and openness of critical indicators that measure adaptation and resilience to climate change.

Building on our experience with the Open Data Inventory (ODIN) and our collaboration with PARIS21 and the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) as part of the Climate Change Data Ecosystem project, ODW has identified 19 indicators for assessment that connect to important resilience and climate change adaptation frameworks. These “sentinel” indicators are representative of the foundational information that users need to formulate policies for adaptation and resilience to climate change. The OCDT evaluates each indicator along dimensions of availability and openness to allow users to assess the capacity of their statistical systems to produce data needed by policymakers and by citizens.

The OCDT contains a detailed list of the indicators and the scoring template for use by those producing and using climate change across the national statistical system and by non-governmental stakeholders.

How were the OCDT indicators selected?

ODW’s indicator selection specifically builds on the CODE Climate Data for Adaptation and Resilience Typology (Climate-DART). The Climate Dart identifies 14 focus areas of adaptation and resilience. The OCDT distills each focus area to one or more indicators to create a minimum set of indicators that reveals a country’s ability to capture and use information relevant to national adaptation strategies and other climate change adaptation and resilience undertakings. To be selected, these indicators must meet the following criteria:

• • Indicators are clearly defined with internationally agreed methodology. Many climate change indicators are still in development, and countries should prioritize those already in general use and for which reliable methodologies exist. This also enables comparison across countries to encourage peer learning.
  • Where possible, indicators that use data collected at the national level have been preferred. While many of these indicators correspond to data published by international custodian agencies, the methodology for each indicator should indicate that they are based on data collected at the country level. Some indicators have been included that involve production of data by international actors but with national coordination and dissemination.
  • Indicators align as closely as possible with existing data frameworks, such as the SDGs or the Sendai Framework. The CODE focus areas are already based on international frameworks such as the Paris Agreement, the SDGs, and the Global Set of Climate Change Indicators.
  • Indicators are less affected by unique geography. For example, mean surface air temperature has been prioritized over sea level, because over 20 percent of all countries do not have coasts.

 

The 19 indicators are further grouped into four categories to enable countries to identify areas of focus in efforts to improve statistical systems for better climate change data:

• • Climate change policies, plans, and programs
  • Population vulnerability
  • Infrastructure
  • Natural resources and environment

 

A simple scoring system provides countries with a quick evaluation that allows them to focus on areas for improvement of the availability and openness of climate data.

How does the OCDT assess data availability?

ODW measures the availability of each indicator by three criteria:

1. 1. Availability of at least one datapoint with all required disaggregations (such as age or sex, specific to each indicator). This is to set a floor for data availability while ensuring data are comprehensive.
   2. Availability of data in the last five years to ensure timeliness of data for planning.
   3. Availability of data at the first administrative geographic level. Climate change data will be relevant to national but also sub-national actors and better planning can be carried out with more subnational data.

How does the OCDT assess data openness?

ODW measures openness of each indicator by three criteria:

1. 1. Availability of data in machine-readable formats to ensure usability of data.
   2. Availability of reference metadata for each indicator to ensure accountability and better understanding of each indicator to enable greater use. ODW looks for three components of reference metadata that are common in all metadata standards:
      
      1. Definition of the indicator, or definition of key terms used in the indicator description (as applicable), or a description of how the indicator was calculated.
      2. Specific date the dataset was uploaded to a website or when a dataset was last updated. The date must include the day, month, and year.
      3. Name of the agency responsible for the dataset.
   3. Availability of an open data license or open terms of use to enable users of the data to use data freely.

 

Each of the six elements are scored and receive equal weighting in the final availability and openness scores. The scoring criteria and methodology are contained in the OCDT workbook. The assessment workbook also contains a list of substitute indicators alongside the list of official indicators for this assessment. Although most of the indicators have strict definitions, closely related indicators can act as substitutes.

Complementarity with other tools

This OCDT complements the work of PARIS21 and CODE. The current assessment builds on the CODE Climate-DART focus areas to determine the included indicators. And it supports PARIS21’s Mobilising Climate Change Data Ecosystems Framework and Toolkit by mapping data and capacity gaps from an external user’s perspective, which provides important context for an internal assessment of capacities to disseminate climate change data. In turn, these efforts complement the work of international organizations such as the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that have produced tools such as UNSD’s Environment Self-Assessment Tool (ESSAT) and the Self-Assessment tool for the Global Set of Climate Change Statistics and Indicators (CISAT), together with the Enhanced Transparency Framework of the UNFCCC. The OCDT provides a practical, high-level overview of a country’s capacity to publish data with a focus on open data; these other tools can be used to delve deeper into issues areas surrounding climate change data.

How to use this tool

ODW devised this assessment tool for use by country teams working on improving the capacity of data systems to produce and publish climate change resilience and adaptation data. Recommended steps for implementing the assessment:

1. 1. Form a team of relevant stakeholders with knowledge of the country’s environmental and climate change databases.
   2. Designate a team leader.
   3. Within the team of stakeholders, designate a team of assessors, assign responsibilities for the 19 indicators by subject matter, and record their findings using the assessment criteria.
   4. Present the assessment scores to the team review findings and discuss strategies for improving national climate change data systems.

During 2023, ODW worked with PARIS21 and CODE to assist the National Agency for Statistics and Demography of Senegal (ANSD) and key stakeholders of the NSS in strengthening the national CCDE in Senegal. ODW provided guidance to the country team by providing an assessment of Senegal based on the OCDT conducted via ODW desk research. In addition, ODW provided comparative results of the availability and openness of these indicators in the publicly available databases of neighboring countries. A public version of this comparative assessment is available here. The comparative assessment emphasizes the importance of coordinating across different stakeholders of the national statistical system to produce indicators that may be cross-cutting and improving time series and subnational data while incentivizing use of data through the adoption of open data licenses.

Better and more open data on climate change and adaptation will be facilitated by coordination that brings together all relevant actors and disseminates data in a way that allows planners to integrate data into strategies that address the impacts of climate change and ensure they can be accessed in the case of disasters. By using the OCDT tool, countries can see at a glance where their data systems fall short and where better production and dissemination can make a difference.

---

Contact information

For questions about the indicators, scoring, or implementation of the assessment, please contact Lorenz Noe and Eric Swanson.

Acknowledgements

Open Data Watch (ODW) developed the Open Climate Data Template (OCDT) as part of a collaborative project led by PARIS21 and including the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE), with support from the Hewlett Foundation.