Made in Humane Club
Global Climate Research Portal is a novel platform to help the climate change research community, across all disciplines and geographies, connect with each other and with the wider stakeholders of the research ecosystem, such as policy makers, businesses, and funders of climate change research.
This open-access platform aims to aggregate information on all ongoing climate change research across the world and make it accessible in a meaningful way. This will enable existing and aspiring climate change researchers along with other stakeholders to learn about work that is happening in real time and connect with researchers across the globe who are working in their area of interest.
Rationale and purpose
There is a high volume of valuable climate change research happening around the world, but the time lag between when that research is initiated and ultimately published (generally several years) means that many opportunities for the timely application of that research, and cross collaboration between those undertaking it, are being missed. Further, at present, there also remain chances of duplication simply because there is no way to know if at any point in time other researchers are working on similar topics.
Given the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, bringing together the climate change research community and consolidating information on their ongoing research onto a single, easily accessible platform will have profound impacts on our collective effort to find timely and impactful solutions to this challenge. Global Climate Research Portal intends to be a one-stop-shop for researchers, policy makers, funding agencies and businesses to discover what climate research is being done where and by whom.
How does this work?
The portal offers climate change researchers (doctoral students in this first phase) to open an account and submit information on their research, such as title of their research project, geographies covered, countries/ cities of case study (if applicable), broad category of research, research timeline and keywords related to the research project, along with their contact details and affiliation. Once vetted for errors and approved by the admin of the platform, their information shall be published onto the database. The portal will consolidate all information submitted by researchers and offer any user the ability to search through it using basic keywords and/ or advanced filters. Users will not need to register or open an account to conduct a search through the database. Researchers will be able to access their account at any point in time and edit/ delete the information submitted by them earlier.
The story so far
In this first phase, the platform aims to bring together the doctoral climate change research community from across the globe onto the platform and consolidate information on their ongoing research. In order to gauge interest of PhD researchers for this platform, information on around 170 doctoral research projects on climate change happening at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT and Yale was collected on a trial basis during 2020 and 2021 and the platform has been launched with that as the base dataset.
In subsequent phases, the full academic research community comprising post-doctoral researchers, research fellows and professors and later the non-academic research community (such as at think-tanks) will be brought together onto the platform.
Funding
Global Climate Research Portal is a not-for-profit initiative. The first phase of this portal has been created through generous development grants from the Somerville College, University of Oxford and the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, also located within Somerville College.
Somerville College, founded in 1879, was one of the first colleges at Oxford to offer an education to women and people of diverse faiths. Since its establishment, Somerville has continued to nurture young minds that became true originals in the worlds of politics, literature, science and the arts: Vera Brittain, Iris Murdoch, Dorothy Hodgkin, Indira Gandhi, Shirley Williams and Margaret Thatcher all studied at Somerville. More information on Somerville College can be found here.
The Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD) advances research on the complex challenges and opportunities of sustainable development in the Indian subcontinent by: bringing disciplines together to address core themes, developing future leaders through fully-funded scholarships, and translating academic research into policy-relevant actions and impacts. Through its conferences and seminars, OICSD has been working to coordinate Oxford’s diverse expertise on India and climate change, law and governance, food and water security, health, clean energy, technology and sustainable cities. More information on the OICSD can be found here
Team
This initiative is a collaborative effort of a team of PhD students at the Universities of Oxford, Harvard, and Yale, all of whom are conducting research on different aspects of climate change.
Gaurav Dubey
Co-Founder & Lead (Strategy & Operations)
PhD Candidate in Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
Researching on “Political economy of low carbon mobility transitions – the case of electric mobility in India
Bill Finnegan
Co-Founder & Lead (Tech. & Design)
PhD Candidate in Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
Researching on “Education in the climate emergency: Smart grids, digital storytelling and the quest for net-zero schools in the UK
Shalini Iyengar
Lead (Legal & Policy)
PhD Candidate in Anthropology, Yale University
Researching on “Enviro-legal rights, environmental anthropology and history in the Bay of Bengal littoral region
Ella Hughes
Advisor
PhD Candidate in Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Researching on “Stable isotope geochemistry as a tool to approach biogeochemical questions
Support us/ Contacts
We are presently looking for funding support to help us expand the functionalities and scope of the platform in subsequent phases. Please drop us an email at research@theclimatelink.org if you’re interested in supporting our initiative.
If you have any feedback or ideas for collaboration, please do reach out to us through email as above. You can also follow us on Twitter (@theclimatelink). We will be very happy to hear from you!