Climate Centre among agencies supported by global fund for humanitarian data
By the Climate Centre
The UN-hosted Complex Risk Analytics Fund (CRAF’d) has this month announced 3.5 million US dollars’ worth of new financing for five agencies – the Climate Centre among them – as part “a major push to transform crisis action,” a press release said.
The investment will cover “critical datasets for internal displacement, migration, climate change, and multi-hazard scenarios, [shaping] global emergency assistance for up to 110 million people, facilitating earlier, faster, more targeted, and dignified responses to crises worldwide,” it added.
Together with its 510 partners, the Climate Centre will help the ICRC integrate data on combined risks into decision-making in the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa, covering climate, displacement, conflict and vulnerability; through case studies, the work will also probe how climate change will impact people and sectors in different ways.
The other four agency projects are:
*A global dataset on internal displacement, covering over 70 million people in need of more sustainable solutions from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
*A dataset on internal migration and associated risk factors covering over 40 million people from the International Organization for Migration.
*Hazard data and models for enhanced preparedness and anticipatory action across East Africa from the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre.
*A risk-data platform with rapid analytics on over 15,000 indicators for early warning and action from the United Nations Development Programme.
‘Data innovation’
The co-chair of the CRAF’d steering committee, Thomas Zahneisen, who is Deputy Permanent Representative of Germany to the UN, said: “Better data empowers us to navigate storms with more precision, ensuring crisis support has the biggest impact, saving more lives and livelihoods in times of growing need.”
The CRAF’d press release noted that the five agencies stood stand “at the forefront of data innovation” and were selected from a competitive pool of over 150 applicants.
“With these investments, CRAF’d partners are cultivating the seeds of a stronger data ecosystem that allows us to get ahead of crises and shocks wherever we can in this time of global uncertainty,” said Guy Ryder, Co-Chair of the CRAF’d Steering Committee and Under-Secretary-General for Policy in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General.
The five new projects build on ongoing CRAF’d investments in partners such as the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, the International Crisis Group, Peace Research Institute Oslo, INFORM Consortium, and other UN organizations.
CRAF’d is supported by the US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the European Commission.
Working closely with the Climate Centre, the ICRC in Somalia late last year distributed 75,000 sandbags to protect against a feared increase in floods related to El Niño, such as here in the central town of Beledweyne. Abdullahi Hassan, pictured, was one of 200 farmers who were then able to protect their crops. The International Committee and National Societies now hope to get a better read on the future climate thanks to a new data-gathering project supported by the UN-hosted Complex Risk Analytics Fund. (Photo: Erin Samson Chege/ICRC)