Exploring the Potential of Digital Public Goods to Spur Climate Resilience

Illustrations of people with a world and connecting dots behind them

Author: Jameson Voisin, Director of Programs and Communications, Digital Public Goods Alliance Secretariat

Digital public goods (DPGs) are playing a pivotal role in tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges, including access to finance, healthcare, and education. Similarly, with over 20 DPGs relevant to climate action, they are not only shaping responses to climate issues but demonstrate the crucial role they can play.

As climate change impacts vary across different regions, it is becoming clear that while the challenges may be local, the solutions needed are often applicable to different regions. This is where DPGs can excel, providing adapted solutions that can be tailored to meet the unique needs of different regions or countries. Their potential doesn’t stop there. DPGs enhance interoperability, enabling systems to communicate and provide real-time updates. This capability supports a holistic approach to climate action as different systems can work together—including not only those designed for climate relevance but also systems for sectors impacted by climate change, such as agriculture, healthcare, and international trade. Moreover, open data and open content DPGs can help facilitate informed decisions and the implementation of effective policies that address the pressing challenges posed by climate change.

The DPGA is deeply committed to climate action. A core target of ours is that by the end of 2028, there are sustainably maintained and highly relevant digital public goods available that enable diverse groups of stakeholders to take action and improve the collaboration needed to fight and adapt to climate change.

Exploring previous DPGA Secretariat efforts on climate action

The DPGA Secretariat first started exploring the relevance of DPGs to climate action by convening a community of practice that brought together dozens of practitioners working across different organisations to explore how DPGs can meaningfully contribute to adaptation and mitigation efforts. Specifically, this work focused on the hindrance caused by the scarcity of reliable datasets for decision-making and the potential of open datasets to support tools that drive innovation and strengthen climate resilience. This effort culminated in a report co-published by the DPGA, ITU, and WMO advocating for weather, climate, and hydrological datasets to be made open and freely available as digital public goods. The report also highlighted a series of exemplary DPGs, showcasing how open datasets help power open-source technologies for climate adaptation.

In 2024, the DPGA Secretariat was a partner on Reboot the Earth, with DPGA members FAO and the UN Office of Information and Communications Technology alongside Salesforce and the UN Youth Office. Reboot the Earth was a series of social coding events that brought together youth to improve or build open-source solutions that address the climate crisis. Events were held online and in the USA, India, Ethiopia, and Morocco. Selected solutions were presented at OSPO for Good. Now, mentors are working with the groups to further develop their ideas with the intention that many become DPGs.

Also in 2024, the DPGA Secretariat partnered with DataPrivacy Brazil to explore how DPGs can accelerate climate action and support the implementation of climate policies, particularly within the framework of digital public infrastructure (DPI). The report highlighted the potential for DPGs to advance Brazil’s climate objectives and approaches for incorporating them into policy, effectively bridging policy and action and enabling scalable, impactful climate solutions at both national and regional levels.

Most recently, the Digital Public Goods Alliance’s Annual Members Meeting in Singapore, in November, held a dedicated track to digital public goods for climate action. This track showcased how DPGA members including Creative Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation, Norad, DIAL, UNDP, and FAO are leveraging DPGs to address climate concerns. There, we also had the opportunity to hear from many digital public goods product owners, including those from Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform, GeoPrism Registry, Energy Access Explorer, DiCRA, and PRISM. We learned that some of the advantages of becoming a DPG for climate action solutions include enhanced visibility and credibility, which significantly boost adoption by government agencies and international organisations. Having DPG status has also helped promote collaboration, while breaking down knowledge-sharing silos, increasing transparency and interoperability, paving the way for more effective and inclusive climate action, especially in areas where climate action overlaps and relates to other sectors such as health and agriculture.

Despite these advantages, challenges persist, such as accessing quality data and achieving better interoperability, which complicate moving beyond one-off use cases to sustainable, wide-reaching solutions. Additional hurdles include securing long-term funding, retaining skilled programmers, and effectively integrating AI technologies to maximise their impact on climate action.

Determining the way forward
Recognising both the challenges that DPGs face and their potential, and the opportunity the DPGA has to disrupt norms and create lasting change, the DPGA Secretariat soft-launched four draft Calls for Collaborative Action at the Annual Members Meeting. These calls are designed to galvanise the community around concrete deliverables and outcomes that can accelerate impact in priority areas such as climate action. One of the draft calls focused on the need to identify DPGs for multidimensional climate action by creating and supporting high-quality earth observation DPGs that can enable diverse stakeholders to tackle climate challenges and build resilience. The finalised calls will be launched in the 2025 State of the DPG Ecosystem Report, slated to be released in February 2025.

Complementary to the call on high-quality earth observation, in 2025 the DPGA Secretariat aims to further refine the understanding of what types of DPGs are needed for diverse groups of stakeholders to take more effective climate action. The DPGA Secretariat’s thinking so far, which has also been significantly informed by sessions and conversations taking place at the Annual Members Meeting, has identified three potential angles to explore further:

  • High-Quality Earth Observation: As prioritized also in the Draft Call for Collaborative Action, we see high strategic relevance in more high-quality open source earth observation tools, including but not limited to datasets and data portals, that empower diverse stakeholders from different organisations and with different primary focus areas to monitor, mitigate, and adapt to climate change impacts with enhanced precision. 

We see the following topics as highly inter-linked and also potentially of high strategic relevance for more effective climate action:

  • Technologies for Policy Bridging: Open source solutions supporting national climate objectives and approaches for incorporating them into other policy domains, such as the measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of carbon emissions/footprints or rural environmental registries.
  • Climate Knowledge Infrastructure: Open source platforms enhancing information integrity related to climate challenges and effective mitigation and adaptation strategies, enabling open access to research, and sharing climate data to drive innovation and transparency.

As we delve into these crucial topics in the coming year, the DPGA Secretariat remains dedicated to fostering more collaboration and innovation. Stay tuned for more updates as we look forward to sharing our evolving understanding of the importance of DPGs in climate action with the broader community! If you are working on a climate solution, we encourage you to nominate it to the DPG Registry.