Energy and Climate Report Source: Energy and Climate Report: News Archive > 2015 > June > 06/09/2015 > News > International Climate: U.S. Commits to Helping Developing Nations With Climate Adaptation Through Partnership

International Climate U.S. Commits to Helping Developing Nations With Climate Adaptation Through Partnership

By Andrea Vittorio

June 9 — The U.S. government is teaming up with the U.K. government, development banks, Google and other private sector partners to help developing nations become more resilient to climate change. “The United States is deeply committed to helping the poorest and most vulnerable nations become more resilient to the growing impacts of climate change,” John Holdren, President Barack Obama's top science adviser, said June 9 at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Developing countries are particularly vulnerable to climate change because they often lack the resources and technical capacity to effectively prepare for and respond to impacts like rising seas, hotter temperatures and storm damage. So the new partnership is putting more than $34 million toward sharing climate science, tools and training with countries in need, starting with Colombia, Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Pablo Vieira, Colombia's vice minister of environment, said having access to sound, readily available climate data and information will make a difference—“a difference that can be measured in lives saved, damage prevented and resources invested in climate-smart development activities.” Local, Regional View of Impacts With a new down-scaled climate modeling dataset from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, countries will be able to see at local and regional scales how temperatures and rainfall may change on a daily basis out to 2100. NASA says this kind of information could help scientists and planners better understand threats such as severe drought, floods, heat waves or losses in agricultural productivity.

It was made with help from Google, which is providing one petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of cloud storage and millions of hours of cloud computing on the Google Earth Engine to ingest and interpret government-held climate data (53 ECR, 3/19/14). Making Climate Data Shareable Tyler Erickson, a senior developer advocate at Google, said one of the greatest things his company can do to combat climate change is to provide information to others. Google can “take the very valuable government information that's being generated in the U.S. or the U.K. and other places around the world and simplify that, condense that and present it in such a way” that millions or billions of people can use it, Erickson said at the event. Esri, a company that develops geographic information systems (GIS) software, also will help make climate data more accessible by launching what Esri's government strategist Patricia Cummens described as “almost like a Facebook for maps.” The online tool, being piloted in Ethiopia, will allow users to publish and share climate data and other information useful for adaptation planning. Work Toward Climate Agreement The new partnership also includes efforts from the U.K. government to improve weather and climate forecasting capabilities in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It builds on work already under way across the Obama administration to make the federal government more prepared for climate impacts and to incorporate climate resilience into foreign aid and development work (184 ECR, 9/23/14). These federal adaptation efforts were recently outlined in a formal submission to the United Nations. That document complements an earlier U.S. commitment to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. The UN hopes to get pledges like these from nearly 200 countries for a year-end climate deal. So far, the U.S., the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Russia and a handful of other nations have sent theirs in. At the event, Vieira promised to submit Colombia's contribution by the end of July or early August, and Bangladesh's ambassador to the U.S. said his country would do the same by Oct. 1. To contact the reporter on this story: Andrea Vittorio in Washington at [email protected] To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Pearl at [email protected]

Energy and Climate Report - Esri

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