Climate Data Collaborative

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

Climate decision-makers need authoritative, reliable, trusted, and granular data to take effective action, but critical information is scattered across disconnected systems, institutions, and organizations. Public and private sector leaders often rely on inconsistent data sets that make coordinated climate action difficult. Competing regulatory requirements across different agencies and jurisdictions further complicate efforts to create unified data systems. Many decision-makers are unaware of what information exists that could improve their outcomes, while private companies typically maintain proprietary data with limited opportunities to share insights across sectors.

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 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 mitigation decisions. 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 accountability and financial decision-making. We convene coalitions of thought leaders, support the development of open-source protocols and analytical tools, and create communication resources that demonstrate the value of data coordination and infrastructure while making climate information easier to understand and use.

Our Approach

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

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

Data must be actionable. Timely, easily accessible, easy to understand, and supported by storytelling.
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

Supporting the Data Environment to Scale Nature-Based Solutions

Developing an end-to-end NBS data interoperability framework, piloted through an open source forest carbon platform that integrates forest carbon data of multiple scales and from various providers. (Coming soon)

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

Establishing the Global Digital Single Market Data Alliance

The goal of the Alliance is to work 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.

Understanding Local Decision-Maker Needs through an Open Data Inventory Portal

Crosswalk Labs and the Data Foundation launched a partnership in 2024 to democratize emissions data and empower local communities to take informed climate action. Through this collaboration, we have launched an open data portal at open.crosswalk.io providing free access to neighborhood-level emissions data, are working to expand coverage to include verifiable emissions estimates for all U.S. census tracts across additional years, and have begun outreach to local governments and community organizations to promote the use of this data in climate action planning.

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.

Launching a Coalition focused on Sustaining, Advancing, and Scaling GHG Information for Impact (Coming soon)

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