About us

What is our mission?

Our mission is to improve the discoverability of openly available, evidence-based insights on the climate crisis to the general public, academics, researchers, journalists, policy makers and others.

To achieve this, the ‘Climate Insights Directory’ team is building an index of reports, policy briefs, analyses and other documents openly published by civil society organisations from around the world.

Through doing so, we aim to further improve the quality of discourse around the climate crisis and support climate action.

Why are we doing this?

The high-quality information produced by civil society has a fundamental role to play in shaping the global response to climate change.

However, despite the efforts of individual civil society organisations, that knowledge is not always available in an easy to find format. Unlike government documents or academic literature which typically have large-scale knowledge management systems, researchers, press and members of the general public often have a hard time finding the backfile of reports, briefings and other insights from civil society.

We want to bridge that gap: building an online location for people to search for, find, click through to, and understand the wide range of available information published by civil society organisations on the climate crisis.

We hope to increase the visibility of civil society's work. We also believe it will make it easier for the climate movement to find insights from their peers to inform further research and avoid duplication, as well as aiding archiving of climate communication from civil society.

You can find a description about our emerging editorial practice on the Updates blog.

What are we not doing?

The Insights Directory is focused on openly published content from civil society. It does not intend to index governmental, academic or news media/journalistic content at this time.

We take climate information integrity seriously: as much as possible, we are excluding content from organisations that have funding from extractive or polluting industries described by the IPCC as major contributors to climate change and organisations identified by researchers in the CAAD network as associated with climate denial or misinformation.

Are we missing something? Or did you find a mistake?

This project is still a work in progress, if you think we could improve something please contact: info@climateinsightsdirectory.org.

Feedback we are looking for includes:

  • Did we mislabel something or include content that shouldn't be here? If you find anything on the directory improperly included or in need of correction, please do let us know.
  • Did we miss something from an organisation? Sometimes our editorial process excludes content that could be included, because we weren't confident about the quality or scope of the document.
  • Are we missing an organisation? If we haven't included an organisation with evidence-based insights yet: we just haven’t found it in our editorial process.

Can we remove our organisation’s content from the Climate Insights Directory?

Yes - any organisation can opt to have their content removed from the Insights Directory. To lodge a request, please contact info@climateinsightsdirectory.org

Our intention is not to replace the role of an organisation’s own website, and we always include a direct link to where we found publications. Our hope is to increase the visibility and readership of your publications and put them in the context of other civil society work.

We believe that it is beneficial for individual organisations, the climate movement as a whole, and for the quality of discourse on the climate crisis for the Climate Insights Directory to be as comprehensive as possible. If you would like to talk more about our mission and your organisation, please contact info@climateinsightsdirectory.org

Are you a researcher? Contact us!

Our collaborators at Discourse Lab are deliberately helping us curate the content to be as useful as possible for researchers working on social science, communications and other computational social science projects. The hope is to learn about what civil society is saying, connect it to other corpi (like Climate Policy Radar’s documents or academic literature in Open Alex) and have that research influence how we grow and shape the corpus.

Research questions we plan to look at over the coming year include:

  • Where are the topic or geographical gaps in the insights civil society is focusing on?
  • What can civil society organisations in different geographies and sectors learn from each other about climate communication approaches?
  • How often do organisations in one geography refer to examples in other geographies when trying to explain policy options?
  • And many more…

If you are doing research on these or similar topics, please contact us info@climateinsightsdirectory.org

Who we are

Climate Insights Directory is a project hosted by the Meliore Foundation, and contributed to by a network of climate communications researchers. We index the work of climate civil society, describe it and share with you analysis of what we find. Here is who is building the directory itself:

  • Alex StinsonEditorial and Product lead

    Alex is an open data and knowledge practitioner, focused on making the internet a better place for civil society expertise. He is responsible for building the corpus and product managing the editorial workflow. Alex had over 11 years working with Wikimedia, the non-profit supporting Wikipedia.

  • Travis CoanDiscourseLab

    Dr. Travis Coan is a Professor of Computational Social Science University of Exeter and co-director of the Centre for Climate Communication and Data Science. He co-founded DiscourseLab and helped conceptualize, design, and build the AI system behind the Climate Insights Directory. His research on climate change communication underpins the taxonomies and classification methods the platform runs on.

  • Mirjam NankoDiscourseLab

    Dr. Mirjam Nanko is a senior computational social scientist working with DiscourseLab. She led the development of the document collection and analysis system powering the Directory. Trained as a quantitative social scientist, she works with statistical modelling, machine learning, and natural language processing, and has published widely on climate misinformation and the political influence of climate contrarianism.

  • InfinilabsFrontend Implementation

    The website's frontend technology is built and maintained by Infinilabs. The team is led by Dr. Pablo Ermida who is a co-founder of Infinilabs.

Documentation and data

Further reading for anyone building on the directory rather than browsing it — how the corpus is sourced, what each release tier permits, and where machines should look first.