Welcome to the testing version of the Climate Insights Directory.

The Climate Insights Directory team is a group of digital knowledge curators passionate about making sure that the global network of civil society organisations working on climate gets their research seen.

Our mission is to improve the discoverability of already 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 freely published by civil society organisations from around the world.

Our editorial approach

While the international community working on climate has a robust scientific backing on how to act, often the critical bridge between high-quality information and action is created by civil society. Civil society publications have a fundamental role to play in shaping the global response to climate change.

However, despite the best efforts of individual civil society organisations to distribute their research, that knowledge is not always easy to find or in a place where it’s easy to compare different kinds of evidence. Unlike government documents or academic literature – which typically have large-scale knowledge management systems and publication ecosystems – 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.

That is where we come in: we are building a directory of these documents. We are actively curating a list of all of the civil society websites which host published insights related to climate change, indexing those documents, and describing them to make them easier for others to find. Through this process, we hope to create a globally representative and multidisciplinary “view” into the insights of civil society experts on climate.

This is different from other websites that approach the same problem from more of a curatorial perspective building collections for different audiences or sector specific networks.

You can read more about our editorial approach the About Us page.

How are we curating insights?

We are actively trying to find organisations with a history of publishing evidence based reports, white papers, statements, and public facing information. Our goal is to be as inclusive as possible, including organisations of all sizes and mission scopes, from human rights to data based arguments, from economic evaluations to policy briefs.

We are going to be growing the corpus through releases of 50-100 organisations at a time, focused on filling “gaps” in our collection. This gap finding approach is designed to find smaller organisations working in different corners of climate civil society, and give us a chance to examine civil society websites from parallel sectors with significant publication programmes on climate topics (such as nature conservation, international development and human rights)

As you may have noticed, we have currently identified more than 20,000 documents on our website, that fall within our scope. We are starting the collection process around the energy transition in different geographies — energy is the largest emitting sector, and the energy transition is frequently a building block for decarbonising other parts of society.

We are starting with regions outside of Europe and the United States, because research about civil society responses to the energy transition consistently identifies gaps in visibility outside of those regions (i.e. in the recent Global Assessment of Climate Obstruction ). We chose to start by identifying organisations publishing about Africa inspired by the recent rapid expansion of renewables in the region in the last 12 months. Try searching for "energy transition in South Africa" or "energy transition in Kenya".

After we finish this tour of the energy transition, we will start filling in gaps around other issues and themes important to climate civil society, such as transportation, adaptation, and agriculture. When we see gaps in our data around specific countries, we also plan to specifically collect from organisations writing about those geographies. You will see content releases describing these updates every few weeks on this blog.

In one of our early releases, we are also going to cover information integrity on climate change and climate communication. Information integrity is critical to our mission, and we are inspired by the CAAD coalition. After information integrity, we plan to continue our tour around the world with the energy transition.

We are still working on the metadata, but we wanted to share it with you anyway. Give us feedback!

Every good archival and library project is built on top of metadata. Metadata consists of the fields that describe a document and make it easy to sort and navigate between the documents (read more about how the scholarly community does this).

In this release of the website, we are demonstrating a proof of concept of the different metadata fields that we hope to collect for the entire corpus.

Some of this metadata was collected by extracting them from the original documents, including:

• Author
• Organisation Name
• Title
• Publication Date
• We plan on adding several other fields, including "Contributing organisations" extracted directly from the documents.

This data is extremely high quality, especially where the original documents had consistent formatting.

The other data is developed through our experimental labelling process using small, locally run, large language models that include a check against climate-specific vocabularies and quality control measures. We released it in “Alpha, still testing” status to begin surfacing some of this data in our interface. However, we are testing it and are in the process of normalising topic tags against a controlled vocabulary and improving the output quality control across the fields. We will publish a methodology once this stabalises.

Here is what you will find:

• A summary of the text, focused on describing what kind of argument a document makes.
• A highlight of major insights from the text, which summarises key insights that should be useful for any climate communicator.
• Our “Regions discussed” field, highlights the geographies described in the report.
• Experimental classifications of the documents on key dimensions important to climate communication, including climate-specific topics and argumentation type. Our next step is to improve the normalisation of this classification and connect it to Linked Open Data.

Our goal is to organise the content so that anyone doing research or searching for reports related to a major topic on climate action or policy, will be able to find related reports that use similar evidence, arguments or communications strategies. Our next step is to provide “concept pages” that allow us to map out the insights based within a Geography or Theme.

Our data partner at Discourse Lab has a long history of social science research on climate and is helping us design a robust and reliable method for using local large language models to build high quality metadata. We are also learning from other open source projects, such as Climate Policy Radar, and are basing some of the decisions on experiences that they have documented.

We’re just started, and one goal of our project is to make this corpus available to more researchers. If you would like to help us improve our data and labeling process, please reach out: info@climateinsightsdirectory.org

What is next?

We have a lot planned in the next few months, starting with better navigation pages for Organisations and Geographies, and more improvements fields and extractions that make it even easier to “see” what each document is about. If you have any questions or would like to help us improve our data, please let us know: info@climateinsightsdirectory.org