Where are children most vulnerable to the impact of climate change, both now and in the future?
Background & Detail:
Leveraging existing work carried out by UNICEF to build a Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI), which uses past and current data to assess climate hazards, child wellbeing and macro resilience. We would like to be able to predict where children are going to be most vulnerable to the impact of climate change. The aim of this project to provide UNICEF with the information required to target their climate change response and resilience investments to best serve the most vulnerable children of today and tomorrow.
Desired Outcome:
The desired outcome of this project is to create a sustainable, user-friendly tool that provides a geo-spatial analysis, to a sub-national level, of predicted climate change impacts on vulnerable children, thereby also mapping demographics through disaggregated data.
Skill Sets:
Below are the broad skill sets needed to meet this challenge. It is likely that there may be additional skills required. We encourage applicants to propose capabilities that may lie out with the work packages below, as these will also be considered when forming a collaboration.
Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Data Engineering
The collaborative team will seek to use data to predict how the CCVI will change in the future. Data will come from a broad variety of sources, both traditional and novel. The team will need to navigate these engineering challenges and work in collaboration with topic experts and geospatial data architects to perform suitable analysis in order to address the challenge question.
Geospatial Data Architecture
The collaborative team will need to assess and predict changes to the CCVI at both national and disaggregated sub-national levels. This will require expertise in compiling geospatial data, building pipelines and assessing outputs. The outcomes will need to be accessible for assessment and evaluation within existing geospatial systems used for programmatic decision making.
Climate Change Modelling, Demographic Modelling
The collaborative team will need contextual expertise of data and models currently used to understand climate change and the subsequent impacts this will have on broader environmental hazards and populations globally and sub-nationally.
Funding Availability:
For this challenge question, The Data for Children Collaborative can fund project partners a portion of up to £180,000. The funding available to individual organisations will be dependent on the agreed contribution to the project once the collaboration has been formed and delivery plan approved.
We welcome applications from all sectors (private / public / third / academia) and encourage submissions from any team looking to do any in kind Data for Good work to develop their expertise.
Academic partners will receive 80% of their FEC.
If possible, we encourage private sector partners to provide time pro-bono. Funding is available at 70% of total contribution with 30% match funded through in-kind contributions. This is an experimental development project and VAT will not apply to any agreed funding.
Timescales & Deliverability:
We would aim for the collaboration to begin work on a project by 1st March 2021. We envisage that a project addressing this challenge question should take approximately 12 months.
The deadline for submissions is 15th December 2020 with the collaboration workshop taking place week commencing 11th January 2021.