Forum One is making a commitment to help lead research to identify the information and data needs of planners, investors, and others working to address the risks of climate change. We’re making this commitment because of the importance of improving how communities and others address climate change — and because we see the critical role that better information and data services can play!

About the Partnership

PREP is focused on helping communities, companies, and investors use data to improve climate resilience planning through enhanced data and insights on climate variability and change. PREP partners will seeks to empower a data-driven approach to building climate resilience by:

• Engaging communities to identify data needs 
• Identifying and reducing the barriers to access, contribute, and use data and information products for climate resilience
• Developing an open-source platform to enhance access to and usability of climate-relevant data and information

Forum One’s Commitment

Over the next year, we will help lead the Partnership’s effort to define and document the information and tool needs of communities that are working to manage the risks of climate variability and change. We know that it is critical to have a strong understanding of these users’ needs to guide PREP and its partners in developing improved data services. We’ll be looking at the needs of resilience planning across sectors including infrastructure, health, agriculture, and others.  We’ll do this research using online collaboration and surveys of target users around the world.

Forum One brings to this effort a deep expertise in digital user experience, policy communications, and using open source technology for data management and communications. Having worked with influential initiatives such as the US Global Change Research Project, the Gates Foundation, the USAID “Global Innovation Exchange”, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and others, we are thrilled to be a part of this new initiative. Forum One has also worked on the launch of the Health Data Consortium, the leading organization for collaboration around health data and the host of the Health DataPalooza.

As part of our work with PREP, Forum One will also bring insights from the “Climate Open Data Partnership Workshop” we organized and facilitated in Washington DC in April 2015. The event brought together 60 decision-makers from OSTP, other Federal agencies, for-profit software and information service providers, and researchers and academics. The workshop focused on strategies to continue the momentum of the OSTP “Climate Data Initiative” through a public private partnership hosted outside of government.

Further Reading

• PREP website
• White House OSTP Fact Sheet
• WRI Press Release: “New Public-Private Partnership Launched to Help Communities Bridge Gap Between Climate Data and Resiliency Planning”
• Reuters: “PREP-aring for a Changing Climate by Harnessing the Data Revolution”
• Executive Gov: “White House Forms Public-Private Partnership for Climate Preparedness”
• Environmental Leader: “White House, Google, Amazon, Launch Big Data Tool to Help Companies’ Climate Resilience Planning”