A living, community-led metadata catalog of geospatial data for climate risk assessments: an introduction to Climate Risk STAC

Climate risks are increasing globally due to climate change, driven by intensifying climate hazards (e.g. storms, floods) and changes in socioeconomic conditions that drive exposure and vulnerability. Climate Risk Assessments (CRAs) constitute a tool to understand such risks under current and future conditions, based on the analysis of geospatial datasets. However, CRA data are often scattered across different data platforms, therefore inhibiting their Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR). Consequently, selecting appropriate datasets for the CRA at hand can be a daunting and time-consuming task.

To make CRA data FAIR, we develop Climate Risk STAC, a living metadata catalog of open-access geospatial datasets that is hosted in a collaborative environment for further development. Climate Risk STAC (version 0.1) includes 214 data entries of 84 global-scale datasets from nine different hazards, five types of exposed elements, and seven vulnerability categories. All data entries can be explored in a user-friendly browser which eases selection of suitable data. We further encourage contributions of new datasets, thereby facilitating a continuously growing, community-led catalog that reflects the current state-of-the-art in CRA concepts and data. Version 0.1 currently focuses on global-scale geospatial data. Due to its flexible and collaborative design, the catalog can easily be extended to accommodate datasets from other domains and at other spatial scales. Climate Risk STAC is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14018438.