Climate Resilience Domain Working Group

Overview

The Climate Resilience DWG will concern itself with technology and technology policy issues, focusing on geospatial information and technology interests as related to climate mitigation and adaptation as well as the means by which those issues can be appropriately factored into the OGC standards development process.

Project Scope

The OGC Climate Resilience DWG will provide an open forum for the discussion and presentation of interoperability requirements, use cases, pilots, and implementations of OGC Standards in the context of cross-sector climate actions. Targeted activities will include involve defining, collecting, analyzing, and communicating data streams, building value from raw data through to effective information visualization and interpretation. The scope of the Climate Resilience DWG is support for any action that accelerates our collective readiness to access, fuse, and analyze data related to climate change with earth observation or any other type of data relevant for climate action, like social science data, in order to contribute to the global push for achieving climate resilience. The goal of this DWG is to support the development of a reliable foundation for science services that are used in climate change actions. The DWG should work towards the sustainable development goals (SDGs) defined by the United Nations (UN).

Background

Producing and providing reliable climate information requires huge volumes of data to be assembled and processed from different scientific ecosystems – requiring standards and collaboration to support evidence-based decision making. Since the looming challenge of achieving climate resilience is global in nature, spatial aspects must therefore be addressed on a global scale. OGC’s mission of enabling FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data plays a special role in designing Climate Resilience Information Systems. The entire climate information ecosystem around data should adhere to the FAIR principles. In this particular case, climate change services translate scientific data generated by the scientific community into relevant information supporting decision-making, esp. on local to regional scale. These services combine multiple sources of information, such as future climate projections from data modeling centers, remotely sensed data from satellite instruments, and ground measurements from observation networks, to create climate products and services tailored to decision-makers’ needs. Although the tailoring process is specific to local contexts, all climate change services face similar challenges. This calls for extending the concept of FAIR data to FAIR climate change services. Thus, not only data, but full climate resilience information systems should adhere to the FAIR principles. This requires agreements on metadata aspects for discovery, provenance information as well as Data/software licenses and data/software citation information. Further more application programming interfaces (APIs), and resource models for interaction with the climate resilience information system should be covered and accordingly the long-term preservation (sustainability) of all pieces of the products required for climate services. Climate services provide data for decision-making, that requires reproducibility of data products and documentation of the product’s long-term provenance.

Activities

The Climate Resilience DWG is established with a comprehensive scope focused on enhancing the efficacy of climate change services. Its key activities include identifying and advocating for a standardized suite of interfaces and specifications crucial for climate change services, ensuring a uniform approach to service delivery and data management. The DWG will also keep a vigilant eye on the changing functional and implementation requirements of climate resilience information systems to stay ahead of evolving needs. To ensure these systems remain effective and interoperable, the group will issue Change Requests (CRs) to pertinent OGC standards, carefully balancing the specific needs of the climate resilience domain with the broader utility across various domains.

Additionally, the DWG commits to proactive engagement with the broader community of service and technology providers in the climate change arena. This engagement will be facilitated through a series of conferences and workshops designed to foster dialogue, share insights, and collaborate on the development of innovative solutions to support climate resilience initiatives. Through these concerted efforts, the DWG aims to influence the development of robust, interoperable, and scalable solutions that can support the diverse needs of stakeholders involved in climate change and resilience planning.

Partners

The DWG will collaborate with other OGC Working Groups (WGs) to drive standards evolution and liaise with external groups working on technologies relevant to establishing ecosystems of EO Exploitation Platforms.

Contacts

Working Group Chairs: Ryan Ahola (GeoConnections – Natural Resources Canada), Angel Alos (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Allan Jamieson (Ordnance Survey).