Toward a Climate Data and Intelligence Ecosystem

The government leaders and organizations who are best situated to make a difference in the climate crisis—and who bear the most responsibility for dealing with its impacts—are increasingly finding themselves overwhelmed by vast and constantly growing quantities of new and existing climate-relevant data that, taken as a whole, represent the world’s natural and built environments. Turning to the technology marketplace to help solve this challenge, agencies are faced with many possible products and approaches—but no one, clear “best” way—for integrating this incredibly valuable data and making it actionable. 

On the surface, these problems may seem like good ones to have—too much data and a surplus of credible technical approaches for understanding it all—but in practice, they can stand in the way of taking timely, evidence-based, science-driven action toward better predicting and protecting against the multi-sectoral, cascading impacts of climate change.

Presenting at the Google Government Summit in Washington, DC, Booz Allen senior leaders Katie Hermosilla and Prachi Sukhatankar outlined a vision to overcome these barriers by building and leveraging a Climate Data and Intelligence Ecosystem in partnership with Google Public Sector. The summit brought together industry and federal, state, and local government leaders to explore how technology is helping advance missions that improve lives across the nation and around the world. Here are a few key themes from Booz Allen’s session.  

From snowpack monitoring in the Western Rockies to permeable surface surveys in urban areas across the nation, orbital and earthbound sensors collect more data on a daily basis than a bevy of the world’s smartest people could sort through and analyze in a lifetime. Brought together, assimilated, and standardized in the right way, these vast and diverse datasets can enable the creation of curated data products and analyses that could then be used to inform research and policy, enable critical planning decisions at all levels of government, and foster an innovation ecosystem where all stakeholders, including the public, can contribute.

The current reality is that much of this data remains unused at the sites where it is generated, formatted for antiquated proprietary platforms, and siloed within municipal, state, or agency systems. It’s well within the realm of possibility to change this, but first, stakeholders must align on how to integrate and analyze data at scale and make it discoverable to a variety of collaborators. 

These types of data challenges are not new to us. As part of its large-scale effort to transform itself into a truly data-centric enterprise, one of Booz Allen’s major agency clients had to find a way to integrate siloed data flows from operations all over the globe. Booz Allen helped them do it with a state-of-the-art data platform that brings together over a thousand business systems and provides users unprecedented access to authoritative enterprise data and self-service analytics in a scalable, reliable, and secure environment.

Similar Booz Allen-supported efforts for a space agency client have yielded climate-relevant results in the form of geospatial services, and application program interfaces (APIs) for datasets that support project development in areas like renewable energy, sustainable buildings, and agriculture. 

By aligning stakeholders on the right tools, we can break down and overcome standardization and integration challenges to make data accessible to a broad array of invested users. Moreover, when the same technical architecture and datasets employed by a single agency are repurposed across enterprises and multiple mission areas, collaboration is encouraged, information silos are less likely to form, and significant economies of scale can be achieved.

Combining climate-related mission expertise with knowledge born from our experience overcoming data challenges for the clients above and others, we’ve formalized a set of climate data and intelligence design principles:

Hyper-Localized Analysis: As the climate change impact picture varies substantially by locality, climate intelligence solutions can and should be equipped to deliver the necessary data and analyses to inform locally relevant resilience and response planning decisions.

Open Architecture: Climate intelligence solutions must be built from best-of-breed open-source and cloud-native services assembled atop open architecture to provide flexibility. Delivering full-picture insights across programs and agencies requires the ability to integrate with multiple clouds in such a way that data movement can be minimized.

The Ability to Support a Community of Data Providers: Bringing public, commercial, and agency data sources together is necessary to achieve a deeper understanding of the world’s natural and built environments. This requires a data exchange that allows for rapid collection, ingestion, and data fusion between an array of systems.

Data Democratization: The global and existential nature of the climate crisis warrants putting as many minds as possible to work on analysis and solutions, thus climate intelligence solutions can and should empower citizen scientists as well as professional scientists, researchers, and policymakers with a range of visualizations, self-service analytics, and crowdsourcing options for contributing their data and insights.

Ease of Access: With an eye toward fostering a climate innovation ecosystem, climate intelligence solutions should be designed for scalability and use open APIs that allow access to curated datasets and analytic-ready data products.

Single Source of Truth: To be broadly meaningful and helpful to achieving a diverse set of current and future mission objectives, a climate intelligence solution must have verifiability and transparency built-in so that it offers access to authoritative data sources across climate threat domains such as flooding, drought, extreme temperatures, and wildfire.

Through our new climate-focused partnership with Google Public Sector, we are working together with federal agencies and their regional partners to tackle climate challenges with easy access and insights into the disparate data streams necessary for science-backed climate planning, mitigation, and response.