Making climate data accessible as a step toward addressing climate change.

If we want to solve the world’s most pressing problems, the knowledge about those problems must be open. Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, has been one of the world’s most pressing problems for decades.

Creative Commons launched the Open Climate Data project in Spring 2023 to facilitate the opening and sharing of large climate datasets and climate data models available around the world.

About the project

Climate data that is open, accessible, and easy to use is critical for those that want to find it, read it and build on it in order to address climate change. Our goal is to provide comprehensive and transparent guidance in response to the question “What am I allowed to do with this climate data?” for scientists, researchers, policymakers, educators, civil society organizations, advocates, journalists and others working to understand and address climate change.

Landscape Analysis: We’ve surveyed the open climate data landscape to better understand the permissible uses of existing large climate datasets. Alongside climate data publishers from governments, institutions, and organizations around the world, we are also collectively promoting best practices for sharing climate data.

Recommended Best Practices: We’ve asked major government and intergovernmental climate agencies (including ECMWF, NASA, NOAA, and the World Resources Institute) to advise our practical recommended steps for public climate data-producing institutions choosing the most suitable legal terms and licenses, and using metadata that center the user experience around attribution, licensing, and provenance.

This work is in addition to our Open Climate Campaign (with our partners SPARC and EIFL) which is focussed on opening up research and research data on climate change.

Contact the Open Climate Data Project

Email us at openclimatedata@creativecommons.org.