Data–Pop Alliance has been conducting ongoing research on Big Data, climate change and environmental resilience. With funding from the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID), we published a synthesis report evaluating the opportunities, challenges and required steps for leveraging the new ecosystem of Big Data and its potential applications and implications for climate change and disaster resilience. The report fed into the World Humanitarian Summit to be organized in Istanbul in May 2016.

This is the first podcast in a series of companion pieces that offer insights from the synthesis report.

This companion podcast to the synthesis report “Big Data for Climate Change and Disaster Resilience: Realising the Benefits for Developing Countries,” was funded by UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) was designed to probe experts to speak more about their work and their ideas about the potential and challenges of Big Data.

Titled “Patrick Vinck on Data Breadcrumbs Who Should Get Involved, and Kobo Toolbox” this podcast features expert Patrick Vinck. Patrick delineates what Big Data is and is not. He identifies individual data producers and users as primary stakeholders needed to apply Big Data to climate resilience. He emphasizes the need of these individuals to not only know about the data they are generating, but also to know how to utilize that data.

Patrick Vinck (@developmentdata)

Patrick Vinck, Ph.D., is the director of the Program for Vulnerable Populations at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He works on peace, reconstruction and development projects throughout Africa and Asia including most recently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Ivory Coast. Patrick co-founded KoBoToolbox, a digital data collection project to advance human rights, humanitarian, and social science data collection.

For more on our series: