For Planners and Researchers

For practicing planners, Open Climate is intended to function as a decision support tool, where cities of similar size, climatic characteristics, development trajectories, or demographic composition can easily locate successful (or unsuccessful) approaches to both mitigation and adaption strategies.

For researchers, Open Climate provides access to a curated list of primary and secondary data sets, scientific reports, and analytic tools. It also provides a forum to connect leading ideas with those who can take action through policy and intervention.

Case Studies

Planning for climate change is a complex task that requires access to case studies, different kinds of data, competencies, and knowledge in order to effectively plan for both mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to present or future climatic changes. Both the science and the practice of climate change planning is rapidly evolving, where best practices and state-of-the-art climate science is frequently outdated or obsolete within just a few years. This section explores mitigation objectives, adaption actions, synergies or conflicts, and any trade-off from the proposed action.

Built Environment

Find Built Environment case studies addressing resilience, vulnerability, hazards, risk, uncertainty, and urban strategies.

Energy

Find Energy case studies addressing resilience, vulnerability, hazards, risk, uncertainty, and urban strategies.

Transportation

Find published, best-practice resources addressing transportation, and case studies addressing resilience, vulnerability, hazards, risk, uncertainty, and urban strategies.

Natural Systems

Find case studies on natural systems that address resilience, vulnerability, hazards, risk, uncertainty, and urban strategies.

Data

Find relevant climate change datasets related to climate change, and links to external data sources here. Have or know of a dataset that we're missing? Contact us.

World Bank Climate Data API

Data in the Climate Data API are derived from 15 global circulation models (GCMs), the most comprehensive physically-based models of climate change available and used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Reports. The models simulate the response of the global climate system to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. The data in the Climate Data API have been aggregated to both the country and basin levels.

NOAA CM2 Climate Models

The CM2 Global Coupled Climate Models (CM2.X) provide datasets showing general climate conditions during the 20th century and projections into the 21st century based on various climate scenarios. These two climate models were designed to model the changes in climate over the past century and beyond. The two models were run under different conditions set by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to study the general pattern of warming in the 20th century.

Map

Find others who are facing similar challenges, a summary of current activities and user notes regarding mitigation and adaptation strategies around the globe.

To explore this map in greater detail and with more functionality, you can view it in a separate window here.

Contact

This site is a collaboration between Aalborg University, PIIM, the Parsons The New School for Design,, and the Urban Climate Change Research Network.

For more information or to learn more about how to participate, you can e-mail us at:

Patrick Driscoll, Ph.D. Fellow
patrick@plan.aau.dk
The Danish Centre for Environmental Assessment
Aalborg, Denmark

Chris Goranson
piim@newschool.edu
Director, Parsons Institute for Information Mapping
New York, US

Urban Climate Project