The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR): The Disaster and Climate Risk Data Fellows

To adapt to climate change, people need to understand, communicate and agree on its potential consequences for the societies in which they live This not only requires a common understanding of increasingly common and severe climate-related hazard events but also of the infrastructure, ecosystems and people exposed to them.

However, the production and sharing of climate risk knowledge is inherently complex and historically reserved to the most advanced countries. And the development of disaster risk models, mainly driven by (re)insurance markets, world-class research and data availability, has created a climate risk knowledge gap with the most vulnerable and fragile countries.

Bridging the climate risk knowledge gap means providing the most vulnerable countries with the necessary information, tools and methodologies to learn about and act on climate risk. This is also an opportunity for the wider disaster risk community to expand its understanding of climate risk, combining global climate change and hazard models with more local knowledge to create more robust and focused climate risk analysis.

Aware of the potential consequences of climate change, and equipped with the right digital and environmental skills, students and young researchers are among the best placed to lead the effort of scientific-based climate risk communication. To achieve this goal, however, they require tools and support to access, create and communicate climate risk knowledge in their communities and collaborate with climate risk experts globally.

The Risk Data Library Standard, a project from the Digital Earth team at the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), intends to build an open data standard and suite of open-source tools to make it easier to work with disaster and climate risk data. The Risk Data Library Standard provides a common description of the data used and produced in risk assessments, including hazard, exposure, vulnerability and modelled loss data. It offers a unique way to create, store, exchange and use disaster risk information from different sources.

Building on the Risk Data Library Standard, this grant will go toward managing and supporting a fellowship programme for students and researchers in six countries vulnerable to climate risk to work alongside GFDRR, the World Bank, Swiss Re and their partners to improve the impact of climate risk studies already available or being undertaken in those locations. The grant will ultimately contribute to establishing the Risk Data Library Standard as one of the first of its kind: an open data standard for disaster and climate risk, bringing together users from the (re)insurance, development, humanitarian, government and academic sectors.

The first project component will review and enhance the current version of the Risk Data Library Standard to better respond to disaster and climate risk management needs in the selected countries. In particular, it will focus on extending the Risk Data Library Standard to support the integration of socioeconomic indicators and urban informal settlements in climate risk analysis.

The second project component will support the design and development of training material, documentation and open-source tools to facilitate the adoption and effective use of the Risk Data Library by different groups of users.

The third project component will select and support a community of Fellows from the selected countries to create, learn and communicate climate risk knowledge for their own countries or cities. Fellows will be selected based on their knowledge and skills in disaster and climate risk data as well as their willingness to support their communities. They will receive training and hands-on support throughout the project in order to become Risk Data Library experts and contribute to improving climate risk analysis through the use of the Risk Data Library. 

The project’s expected impact is increased quality, interoperability and availability of climate risk information for climate risk-vulnerable countries as well as enhanced capacities of the Fellows and their communities to make use of them. The activity will complement, and leverage climate risk analysis undertaken in those countries by the World Bank, in particular, under the Climate Change Action Plan.

The project will also collaborate with and contribute to the newly funded Global Risk Modelling Alliance (GRMA), a global public good initiative of the Insurance Development Forum to address barriers to accessing risk analytics. 

Risk Data Library Standard: making it easier to work with disaster and climate risk data (worldbank.org)

Risk Data Library

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