ESIP Update 🌅 COP26 | Nominations | Events

Dear ESIP, 

Good tidings from an unseasonably warm Vermont, where the leaves have yet to fall and no frost has graced our soils. Climate change is on the forefront of my mind. With the closing of COP26 this weekend, I want to share international climate action highlights: 

• As the CLEAN Network and others report, while there are good breakthroughs, climate mitigation pledges are not enough and issues of equity and justice abound. 
• Climate Action Tracker shows climate mitigation pledges put us on track for 2.4ºC of warming — roughly twice as high as the 1.5ºC threshold to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis. 
• Further, the Washington Post investigation found flawed emissions data — in particular, most of the gap between what countries report and what is occurring is due to problematic emissions accounting from land.

The ESIP community is tackling important environmental management challenges for climate action. From supporting wildfire response by the Disasters Lifecycle, Ag and Climate, Semantic Harmonization, and EnviroSensing clusters, to supporting ocean and marine management by the Marine Data and the Biological Data Standards clusters. The ESIP community is advancing critical areas of data management for climate action — from improving the discovery, sharing, and reuse of datasets by the Information Quality, Discovery, Documentation, and Schema.org clusters to unpacking the challenges in using open and public data to answer questions of environmental justice from the ESIP Lab-funded Environmental Enforcement Watch.

As the dust settles from COP26, I am truly excited for our virtual ESIP January Meeting where we’re eager to support the cross-cluster collaboration advancing all this work, and more! Stay tuned for a great lineup of sessions.

In the meantime, if you participated in COP26, please let us know. We’d love to amplify the work you’re doing to help support climate change action. 

Lindsay Barbieri
Agriculture & Climate Information Fellow

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