Improving Data Access for Climate Preparedness Through Public-Private Partnerships

With increasing exposure to extreme hurricane and flooding events, a growing number of communities, companies, and civil society organizations around the world are looking to assess climate impacts and vulnerability, and to develop resilience plans. Currently, efforts to turn data into actionable plans are constrained by limited access to robust, actionable data and information. The Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP), public-private collaboration that seeks to empower a data-driven approach to building climate resilience, aims to facilitate the process for planners, investors, resource managers, and others to routinely incorporate climate risks into their decisions, by enhancing access to relevant data and facilitating collective learning. Together, this peer-to-peer initiative of approximately 30 government, NGO, and business partners built PREPdata, an intuitive, open map-based platform that enables users to visualize, download and layer data to inform adaptation decision-making. The platform also connects practitioners to data providers, closing the feedback loop between them and enhancing the climate data ecosystem. In this session participants will learn how public-private partnerships can reduce barriers to discovering, accessing climate data and will be given an interactive tutorial on PREPdata, specific to the Gulf of Mexico and hurricane and flooding events. Participants will discover ways to incorporate local data with national and global data, learn about PREPdata application case studies, and how PREPdata can be used to analyze risk in hurricane vulnerable geographies.