Contact: Joyce Coffee, managing director, Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index, 312 894 9028, jcoffee@nd.edu
This year marked the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which swept through America’s Gulf coast, wreaking a staggering USD 108 billion in damage and killing more than 1,800 people. In May of 2015, a heatwave in India cost the lives of over 2,200 people. With the number of extreme weather- and climate-related events rising worldwide, it has never been more important for policy makers, urban planners, investors, and others facing climate-related challenges to have the right information at the right time. Today a group of leading players in the climate and development fields issued a clear call for improved knowledge coordination to support action on climate change.
The Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index worked with the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP), the UN’s Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) and dozens of other organizations to create a ‘Climate Knowledge Brokers Manifesto’, which sets out the key principles for exchanging and communicating information related to the climate effectively, enabling a step change in society’s response to a changing climate.
The Manifesto is the brainchild of the Climate Knowledge Brokers’ Group (CKB), founded in 2011 and now counting more than 100 international agencies and programs among its community (www.climateknowledgebrokers.net).
CKB was created in recognition that climate change has growing impacts on people’s daily lives, and will transform local environments the world over for the foreseeable future. “Knowledge needs to be translated, brokered and tailored to ensure we can all make better-informed choices as we plan for and manage the risks, trade-offs and opportunities of climate change said Florian Bauer, COO and Open Knowledge Director at the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership in Vienna, and one of the editors of the Manifesto. “But while our knowledge is technically growing, our ability to process and make use of it is not.”
ND-GAIN’s managing director Joyce Coffee added “We need to increase the uptick in leaders making decisions that save lives and improve livelihoods in the face of climate change. That is why ND-GAIN addresses themes that keep executives up at night – like social, governance and economic issues, combining them with climate vulnerability information to create actionable assessments.”
The group defines the knowledge broker’s role as interpreting, sorting, translating, and integrating this wealth of information and tailoring it for the needs of different audiences – from government decision-makers and business leaders, urban planners and farmers, to everyday consumers and voters.
A short pamphlet version of the Manifesto together with a longer book version in pdf can be downloaded from http://manifesto.climateknowledgebrokers.net.