Personalising climate change through open data and apps

Government-released open data is fuelling a whole new level of innovation in sustainability. Moving beyond hackathons, today’s climate data partnerships are creating unique ventures that cross boundaries between business, government and academia.

In the US, “datapaloozas” – gatherings focused on creating open data innovations in the areas of health, education, energy and safety across sectors – are popping up all over the place.

Recently, the geographic information system technology (GIS) company Esri held the Esri Climate Resilience App Challenge in conjunction with the White House’s Climate Data Initiative. The challenge’s winner, the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Solar Suitability Analysis app, identified the best sites for solar panel installations across the state.

“It’s not possible to say that because of this app challenge we reduced carbon – we cannot make concrete measurements,” said Esri’s technology evangelist, John Yaist. But the technology that came out of the challenge can have “an impact on personal behaviour and thoughts of what climate change means on an everyday basis.”

Yaist points out that climate change has become a “worn out” topic to some people, but apps are a way to “personalise” the abstract concepts of climate change and disaster response. Apps can add to the realness of climate change by making “it into something they can hold in their hand,” he explained.

Esri is also currently running a global disaster relief app challenge with the UN’s Making Cities Resilient campaign. Developers in the competition were asked to create apps to address food resilience and urban disaster relief. Winners will be announced later this month.

Even the crowdfunding website, Kickstarter, hosts a number of climate change open data projects including the Smart Citizen Kit, a crowdsourced environmental monitoring platform and FLOAT Beijing, which uses kites with sensors to measure air quality in Beijing neighbourhoods through citizen science, grassroots mapping, and open source data visualisation.

Scientific discovery

Other corporations are getting in on the open data boom, too. IBM offers free supercomputing hours on its World Community Grid for researchers who are studying climate change in support of the latest iteration of the White House’s Climate Data Initiative.

One of the grid’s projects has the potential to transform the solar industry. Harvard University’s Clean Energy Project screened and publicly catalogued 2.3m compounds looking for new photovoltaic materials. The project found more than 35,000 materials that could potentially double the efficiency of current carbon-based solar cells. The findings of the Harvard Clean Energy Project Database are open to the public to help further the discovery of new materials.

Dr Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Harvard’s lead researcher of the Clean Energy Project and associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, believes it’s important to “give back” the data from his research, because “data is at the centre of scientific discovery”.

Gray data

Open data researchers are quick to point out that using open data can be a lot like looking for a needle in a haystack. Open data is messy and needs a certain amount of translation. Each government organisation has its own way of collecting and sorting data. The labels of data sources, like the column heads of rows of numbers in a spreadsheet, are often confusing and laced with internal jargon or acronyms. It takes time to figure out what’s what.

Add to that the fact that there are no standards for open data – how it is released and in what form it is collected. Some data may be what Aspuru-Guzik calls “gray data” – data that’s half open and half closed, or partially released. Plus, there’s the question of scale. Will the data be used at the city, state, national or global level?

Usable data

Earlier this year, huge floods in Britain caused a stir as people struggled to get information about rising water levels. Under increasing pressure, the Environment Agency released flood data and civic hackers quickly created flood relief apps. “Having given permanent free access to our live flood warnings, flood alerts and river level data, we are expanding this commitment to make as much of our data as possible open,” said Doug Wilson, director of scientific and evidence services at the Environment Agency.

Wilson said that the Environment Agency is setting up a user group of external parties to help identify which of the agency’s data is most in demand for developers, technology companies and open data enthusiasts. “The intention is that other organisations will be able to use our data to create innovative applications which will help make information about the environment more accessible,” he said.

But getting data in usable formats has been a struggle, said James Smith, web developer of sustainability projects at the Open Data Institute (ODI) in London. “It’s always a battle trying to get the data released and in enough detail,” Smith said.

To help organisations understand how to release data, ODI, which supports open data projects and trains people on the potential economic, social and environmental uses of open data, has created open data certificates which are badges for best practices on how to release data. The institute also has a startup incubator programme for new open data companies and is running an open data challenge for social impact and sustainability with innovation charity Nesta.

Rachael Post is a writer, digital strategist and professor of emerging media in Los Angeles

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