UN Global Pulse and Western Digital Announce ‘Data for Climate Action’ Challenge Now Open for Entries

Global Pulse, the United Nations innovation initiative on big data, and Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC), a global leader in data storage technologies and solutions, announced a partnership today to launch the “Data for Climate Action” challenge.

Data for Climate Action is an unprecedented open innovation challenge to harness data science and big data from the private sector to fight climate change. Data scientists, researchers, and innovators from around the world are encouraged to apply and submit their proposals at DataForClimateAction.org by 10 April 2017.

“Driving effective action on climate change requires not only climate data, but also rich information about human behavior,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of UN Global Pulse. “Big data can provide dynamic feedback on how communities affect and are affected by the climate system, and enable innovation to increase sustainability and resilience. This data is primarily held by companies, like those participating in Data for Climate Action.”

With support from the Skoll Global Threats Fund, this global challenge has galvanized a diverse coalition of companies from multiple industries and countries to participate through acts of ‘data philanthropy’. The challenge will offer researchers an opportunity to gain unprecedented access to national, regional, and global datasets—anonymized and aggregated to protect privacy—and robust tools to support their research.

Companies contributing data for the challenge include:
BBVA Data & Analytics, a financial data analytics company
Crimson Hexagon, an enterprise social media analytics company
Earth Networks, a weather and lightning sensor network operator
Nielsen, a global measurement and analytics company
Orange, a global telecommunications provider
Planet, an earth-imaging satellite network operator
Plume Labs, an environmental data sciences company
Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management and automation
Waze, a free, real-time community-based traffic and navigation app
In addition, researchers may apply to receive cloud-computing support from Microsoft, and visual analytics support from Tableau.

“As the world’s largest data storage company, we understand the power and promise of data, and are passionate about its use as a catalyst for change,” said Dave Tang, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Systems Business Unit, Western Digital.

“We are proud to partner with the United Nations Global Pulse team to not only help build the narrative and framework for the Data for Climate Action challenge but to amplify and drive engagement around the data for social good movement. We look forward to the insights and solutions generated from this challenge and the possibilities they represent for our future.”