Tom P Worknotes

Carbon Brief: Global south climate database

In November, before COP30, I found some time to update Carbon Brief's Global South Climate Database (GSCD). The GSCD's purpose is to be a

publicly available, searchable database of scientists and experts in the fields of climate science, climate policy and energy. The goal of the project, set up by Carbon Brief with the support of the Reuters Institute's Oxford Climate Journalism Network, is to ensure that journalists from all over the world can contact scientists from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific.

-- source

The project had a couple of main aims:

  1. Make it easier for journalists to find the climate expert they need.
  2. Update the data and make the update process simpler to put the project on a firmer footing now that Reuters' support has been withdrawn

A screenshot of a webpage showing a form input with a set of drop down selectors on the left, and the result of those selectors on the right; a set of cards showing the details and expertise of climate scientists working on indigenous rights who can speak Urdu

Making the site easier to update also meant automating the data analysis and chart generation.

A world map with scaled circles showing the geographical spread of people in the database

A bar chart of the top 10 languages spoken by people in the database, the most common language spoken is Spanish, followed by Hindi, French, Portuguese, Urdu, German, Bangla/Bengali, Arabic, Swahili and Malayalam

Projects like this can often suffer neglect in a news environment where breaking news is always going to be prioritised especially in a small team like Carbon Brief. Making sure update processes are smooth and automated is really important to long-term sustainability of data projects.