On September 22, the White House announced the launch of the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP), a public-private collaboration between federal agencies, non-governmental organizations and private companies committed to working to reduce barriers to the use and accessibility of data and information to foster climate resilience. The partnership promotes collaboration to meet these goals.
In addition, “PREP” is also an open-source data-platform that is being developed to foster the ability for local communities to “pull information relevant to their community into data-driven dashboards that can better guide climate adaption decisions.” The PREP platform is in the beta-testing stage, and four dashboards projects from Sonoma County, Porto Alegre (Brazil), the U.S. Global Change Research program and the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group Climate Change in the Puget Sound were initially developed under the beta phase of the platform. In the future, users will be able to create and customize their own a dashboards unique to geographic or topical areas of interest.
The beta version of the PREP platform has web form where communities interested developing their own customized dashboard can submit a request to the PREP team about becoming a pilot platform user. The partnership is also seeking additional partners from the public and private sectors that are committed to support the goals of the partnership. Current partners include NOAA, NASA, Google, Microsoft, ESRI, the Weather Company and the World Resources Institute, among others. The PREP effort developed out of the Obama Administration’s Climate Data Initiative. The partnership is jointly coordinated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and World Resources Institute.
In conjunction with the announcement of PREP and release of the data platform tool, the Obama Administration together with 13 other countries and organizations released a Joint Declaration on Harnessing the Data Revolution for Climate Resilience. The declaration was signed by Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, the Marshall Islands, Mexico, Peru, the Republic of Korea, the United Kingdom, and the U.S, as well as by Amazon Web Services, IBM, Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean, Future Earth, the Group on Earth Observations, Google, Microsoft, World Bank and World Resources Institute. The Joint Declaration identifies specific actions the signatories will take to improve data accessibility to support “local, regional, and national decision-making to build resilience against climate change.” The declaration includes six statements. One of them is a commitment to embracing common technical standards, open climate data standards and data interoperability.