The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), in collaboration with India’s State Government of Telangana, has announced the addition of Data in Climate Resilient Agriculture (DiCRA) to the Digital Public Goods Registry. The platform, which is powered by artificial intelligence, is aimed at strengthening food systems and ensuring food security. Climate change has a multifaceted impact on agriculture, affecting crop yield, nutritional quality, and livestock productivity.
DiCRA can identify farms that are resilient to climate change and those that are highly vulnerable using remote sensing and pattern detection algorithms. It uses open-source technologies in particular to facilitate the sharing of climate resilience analysis and insights based on empirical inputs crowdsourced from hundreds of data scientists and citizen scientists on best performing farms.
As a co-host of the Digital Public Good Alliance, UNDP is accelerating efforts to identify new technological frameworks needed to drive climate adaptation and mitigation in order to meet the goals outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement. DiCRA now joins more than 100 digital solutions that follow privacy and other applicable laws and best practises in order to help achieve the SDGs (SDGs).
Over the course of three months, DiCRA recruited over 500 citizens and scientists from local digital ecosystems to support climate action on 112,077 square kilometres of land in the state of Telangana.
DiCRA exemplifies how a multi-stakeholder collaboration for data sharing – involving governments, research organisations, citizens, and data scientists from all over the world – can promote open innovation to strengthen agricultural climate resilience. Climate data is held by a number of different but interconnected stakeholders, as highlighted in this report by the Digital Public Goods Alliance, International Telecommunications Union, and World Meteorological Organization.
The current data-sharing infrastructure is built on linear flows rather than a distributed, integrated ecosystem. DiCRA goes a step further by allowing open access to both data and analytics derived from open software, allowing them to be replicated globally.
DiCRA is now available to a wide range of practitioners, thanks to its inclusion in the Digital Public Good Registry, and will help promote global cooperation and collaborative action. As part of UNDP’s Digital Strategy, digital public goods like DiCRA are part of the next frontier of digital public infrastructure that will drive sectoral transformation and a concerted effort to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate change goals.
