The Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness

A crucial challenge in building resilience to climate change is the lack of access to useful, timely and credible data and information. Adaptation and resilience practitioners face a confusing and fragmented landscape of platforms and tools, and lack guidance on how to understand and manage climate risk using the data available. This problem is exacerbated by a lack of feedback mechanisms to help data providers understand user needs. PREP addresses these challenges by opening the lines of communication between public and private data providers and users-working with communities who are already building resilience to climate change to create tools that they can actually use. The PREP Partnership brings together a diverse group of stakeholders from the public, private and nonprofit sectors, including government agencies, leading technology companies and networks of climate preparedness practitioners. The partnership supports the adaptation planning community by providing data, technology and technological expertise; building networks among practitioners working toward similar goals soliciting input on user needs and data priorities to streamline and curate data for resilience planning; working to improve interoperability across different data products and platforms; developing products and guidance, and supporting PREPdata applications to build capacity for adaptation planning. In January 2018, PREP launched a map-based, open-data, and online platform called PREPdata. PREP is beginning to work with partner at city, state, and national scales across the globe to put the PREP platform to use in support of efforts to adapt to climate change. As an example, we are working with two state governments in India to support implementation of their climate adaptation strategies. Our model is relocatable: we engage through multiple PREP partners (e.g. Acclimatize, ESRI, WRI, Future Earth), work with a local end-user (two state governments), and build support through external funding to support the work. These applications provide opportunities to support and receive input from adaptation practitioners, particularly in the Global South, and to continue to refine PREPdata to serve a broad community of users.