Formats for Future: Liberating the IPCC Reports on Climate Change

"The theme of OA Week 2022 is Open for Climate Justice and we have invited a team of scientists to talk to us about a project to make the scientific knowledge surrounding climate change more accessible.

Team #semanticClimate is running Formats for Future, an international, asynchronous hackathon during OA Week intended to to liberate and semantify the climate change reports from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC reports – which outline the effects of climate change, the evidence, likely outcomes, and mitigating actions – are published as a set of PDF files which makes them extremely hard to read by humans or machines, preventing their widespread use. The #semanticClimate group looks to liberate the IPCC reports by making their content accessible, usable, and semantified – with the goal of making its knowledge accessible and giving citizens next generation publishing tools to work further with the reports. #semanticClimate is a group of young Indian scientist volunteers developing tools and processes to make the more than 10,000 pages of IPCC reports semantic. They recently ran a very successful hackathon ‘The Climate Knowledge Hunt Hackathon’ attended by Indian policymakers and climate organisations in September 2022...."