Climate Data Collaborative

Accelerating Climate Action: Building Connections Between Data and Decision-Makers

Decision-makers need authoritative, reliable, and granular data to take effective climate and environmental action, but critical information is scattered across systems, institutions, and organizations. The challenge is compounded by inconsistent data across the public and private sectors, proprietary data silos that limit knowledge sharing, and competing regulatory requirements across agencies and jurisdictions. As a result, many decision-makers are unaware of what information exists that could improve their outcomes, making coordinated climate action difficult.

The Climate Data Collaborative launched in fall 2024 to address these critical gaps by bringing together the right people, organizations, and processes to make climate and environmental data work better for decision-makers.

Our Mission

We are building a permanent, independent hub that connects stakeholders across sectors and industries to accelerate climate and environmental action. Our work catalyzes collaboration between the private sector, nonprofits, academics, governments, and philanthropic investors to improve both directional information that reveals trends and patterns for strategic decisions, and investor-grade data that supports markets, accountability, and financial decision-making.

Our Approach

The Climate Data Collaborative operates as a hub-and-spoke model. The hub serves as a center for strategic thought leadership, convening decision-makers across sectors while advancing communications and coordination to drive data improvement and interoperability. Building from the hub, we have established spokes that either fill sector-specific gaps or advance and scale priority activities.

Our work is guided by core principles that shape how we approach climate and environmental data challenges:

Data must be actionable. Timely, easily accessible, easy to understand, and supported by story telling.
Climate-related decisions depend on connected data. Daily decisions at the project level must be connected to decisions made at a regional and national level.
Change requires collaboration. Transparency and collaboration are the foundation of creating both durable data tools and lasting catalytic relationships.
Diverse coalitions are most likely to lead to durable change. Cooperation between stakeholders, from businesses to non-profit organizations, across sectors requires thoughtful facilitation.
Data informed decisions may change as the data evolves. We need to support decision makers with the tools they need to make and explain course corrections.
Resources are only useful if they reach the right people. Creative and persistent dissemination and education strategies will be at the core of our work.

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Current Priority Spokes

Sustaining, Advancing, and Scaling U.S. GHG Information for Impact

The GHG Coalition, a non-partisan technical initiative, connects technical experts from government agencies, academic researchers, private sector innovators, and NGOs to advance a more robust science-based measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) ecosystem in the U.S. The Coalition brings together expertise responsible for foundational U.S. emissions monitoring systems alongside innovators developing next-generation GHG information capabilities to ensure the entire MMRV ecosystem works strategically and efficiently—maximizing the impact of GHG information for climate action.

Establishing the Global Digital Single Market Data Alliance (DSMDA)

The Global Digital Single Market Data Alliance serves as a convening platform engaging governments, regulators, financial institutions and other stakeholders to build the robust climate and natural capital open-source data ecosystems market actors need to access green finance, carbon markets and comply with statutory reporting demands. We're working in partnership with the public and private sector to develop investor-grade data systems and test innovative market solutions that can unlock the private capital needed to support the green transition in low and middle income countries.

Democratizing Access to Emissions Data

In partnership with Crosswalk Labs, we launched an open data portal at open.crosswalk.io that provides free access to neighborhood-level emissions information, empowering local communities to take informed climate action. We're expanding coverage to include verifiable emissions estimates for all U.S. census tracts across additional years and conducting outreach to local governments and community organizations to promote the use of this data in climate action planning.

Supporting the Data Environment to Scale Nature-Based Solutions

We are working to facilitate connections across the entire data lifecycle for nature-based solutions while promoting interoperability and common standards. We are also partnering with Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability to design a "National Nature Data Strategy" which will help coordinate and streamline nature data sharing and facilitate nature-related decision-making.

Advocating for shared and consistent data standards to support clear, consistent, and reliable data.

Climate data suffers from inconsistent definitions and fragmented systems that hinder effective decision-making. Drawing on our organization's experience with the Financial Data Transparency Act and other data laws, we support building upon existing data standards to create layered, interoperable climate data frameworks that maintain context and usability across regulatory, compliance, and operational applications.

Other upcoming spokes include supporting private sector and industry/corporate climate data needs, methane, agriculture, and carbon dioxide removal.

Supporting Carbon Market Data Infrastructure (Coming Soon)

We're exploring partnerships and pilot projects focused on forest carbon, carbon dioxide removal, and methane —areas where reliable performance data remain underdeveloped. Our work includes identifying non-carbon attributes that can be combined with carbon data to promote more standardized, fungible carbon market tools.

Other upcoming spokes include supporting private sector and industry/corporate climate data needs, methane, agriculture, and carbon dioxide removal.