The Climate Knowledge Brokers Manifesto

'Informed decision making for a climate resilient future'

17 September 2015

This year marked the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which swept through America’s Gulf coast, wreaking a staggering USD 108 billion in damage and killing more than 1,800 people. In May of 2015, a heatwave in India cost the lives of over 2,200 people. With the number of extreme weather- and climate-related events rising worldwide, it has never been more important for policy makers, urban planners, investors, and others facing climate-related challenges to have the right information at the right time. Today a group of leading players in the climate and development fields issued a clear call for improved knowledge coordination to support action on climate change.

The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP), together with UN’s Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) and dozens more, are backing the launch of the ‘Climate Knowledge Brokers Manifesto’, which sets out the key principles for exchanging and communicating information related to the climate effectively, enabling a step change in society’s response to a changing climate.

The Manifesto is the brainchild of the Climate Knowledge Brokers’ Group (CKB), founded in 2011 and now counting more than 100 international agencies and programmes among its community (www.climateknowledgebrokers.net). JIN Climate and Sustainability is involved in CKB, as several of JIN's projects are focused on climate knowledge brokering, notably the ClimateTechWiki project. For the Manifesto, 17 contributors, including JIN's Wytze van der Gaast and Erwin Hofman, carried out interviews with 80 climate knowledge brokers and users of climate-related knowledge.

The Manifesto sets out seven key principles for how climate knowledge brokers can have greater impact through collaboration and the use of open data. In the Manifesto, the Climate Knowledge Brokers Group also issues an open invitation for more organisations to join them: “Climate knowledge brokers need to work together to avoid overlap and make sure they are identifying and meeting people’s information needs effectively,” said Geoff Barnard, Senior Advisor on Knowledge Management at CDKN and a founder of the Group. “Only then will climate knowledge brokers meet their full potential for turning knowledge into action.”

A short pamphlet version of the Manifesto together with a longer book version in pdf can be downloaded from manifesto.climateknowledgebrokers.net.