The Goal

We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning software product (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts"). The product will produce a set of climate change impact reports in a given geographical area. The primary end users will include municipal government officials and urban planners, insurance companies, and other stakeholders who are concerned about climate change impacts in that region.

We would like your recommendations on additional tools, content, and features that would be useful to our end users while they are reviewing and sharing these reports.

The Product

The forthcoming software product will use satellite Earth Observation imagery, big data, and artificial intelligence to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology.

The initial focus is specifically on reporting coastal erosion and sea-level rise impacts.

The product development will be as open as possible and require a lot of collaboration with academic groups and scientific communities, as well as communities interested in and affected by climate change (especially coastal erosion and sea level rise). Therefore, while we want to engage primary client segments such as municipal governments and urban planners, we expect there will also be many opportunities to build an online community and engage youth in this ongoing effort.

Your Contribution

While the primary product will be a climate change report indicating the historic and likely future impact of climate change in a chosen area, we expect that our users will want additional assistance while interpreting, collaborating on, and sharing the report. For instance, they may want to:

• video chat with experts on the report findings
• view adaptation tools that are tailored to the results of the report
• communicate with other municipalities that are similarly affected
• Package up some or all of the resulting report and publish it to a public location where it can be widely viewed and shared

We expect you to research climate change adaptation and knowledge-sharing ideas, content, and tools. Then come up with detailed recommendations on features and content we should offer in the product to benefit our end users and increase the effectiveness and value of the product to them.

This will be an exciting new product in a new market so creativity is very welcome and in fact highly encouraged!