22 April 2015: To strengthen climate change resilience, the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Change Support Team (CCST) and UN Global Pulse are launching an open innovation challenge to demonstrate novel ways of understanding the impacts of climate change. The challenge encourages private sector companies worldwide to share large, anonymized datasets related to company operations, supply chains or consumer behavior, which can be used to spur innovation in adaptation.

This “big data,” such as anonymized mobile network data, financial data, social media data, retail data or energy usage data, will be analyzed by research teams and innovators to determine altered patterns, possibly due to climate change. According to the initiative, “routine data being processed by telecommunications companies, banks, utility companies and supermarkets could hold the keys to revolutionary new ways of measuring climate resilience.”

Public institutions are also invited to participate in Data for Climate Action by contributing climate datasets and statistical information. The hosts of the challenge envision using all of the data collected to map how consumers and companies are already adapting to climate change. They imagine a range of possibilities, such as mapping traffic patterns against air pollution, observing a new policy’s impact on water usage or monitoring purchasing habits during a flood or typhoon.

Winners of the challenge will be announced in 2015 and will receive funding to pilot and scale their innovations. Organizations that have announced their partnership with Data for Climate Action thus far include: the World Bank; the Earth Institute; Orange Telecom; the World Economic Forum; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Partnership in Statistics for Development for the 21st Century (PARIS21); and the UN Foundation. [Data for Climate Action Website] [UN Global Pulse Press Release]