11 April 2018: The World Resources Institute (WRI) and over 30 partners have released the beta version of Resource Watch. This online platform brings together hundreds of data sets to facilitate users’ efforts to evaluate and visualize the state of the environment at local, national and global levels.
The platform offers dashboards and alerts to help users monitor environmental conditions. The platform facilitates access to data to help stakeholders make informed decisions about the environment and human well-being. It provides application programming interface (API) documentation to allow developers to pull its data into applications and encourages sharing maps or apps developed with Resource Watch data.
A launch event for the beta version of the platform took place on 11 April 2018, and was addressed by two keynote speakers: Gina McCarthy, former US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator, and Mae Jemison, former astronaut. McCarthy highlighted that, “Tools like Resource Watch are essential for making science accessible to decision makers, so we can turn science into actions that advance policies, technologies and products that improve public health.”
Other speakers included Andrew Steer, President and CEO of WRI, Jonathan Baillie, Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of National Geographic Society, and Rebecca Moore, Director of Google Earth. Moore noted that Resource Watch builds on the foundation established with Global Forest Watch, an online platform that offers data and tools for monitoring forests.
Resource Watch is hosted and convened by WRI, with financial support from DOB Ecology and The Tilia Fund, and additional supporting and institutional grants. At the launch event, Maas Goote, CEO, DOB Ecology, highlighted that the decision to fund the development of Resource Watch was, in part, because WRI would place it in the public domain, with free access for all.
Resource Watch joins several other data platforms that provide data for tracking progress on the SDGs. [WRI Press Release on Launch Event][Resource Watch Platform]