26 SOMERVILLE MAGAZINE
Global Climate Research Portal
Earlier this year, Gaurav Dubey, Somerville student and scholar at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development (OICSD), launched the Global Climate Research Portal, a unique online platform that aims to aggregate information on climate change research happening across the world.
T
he aim is simple, yet immensely important – to provide a one-stop platform for researchers, policymakers and businesses to find out what form of climate change research is happening, where and by whom. Even as researchers have been investigating the causes and impacts of climate change over the past decades, there have been gaps in efforts to connect the research community at the global level, said Gaurav. This is where the portal aims to make a difference. It will offer a platform for climate change researchers to share information on their ongoing research and make it accessible to all in a meaningful way. Unlike other platforms that aggregate information on published research or researcher profiles, this portal will focus on ongoing research. In turn, this will create opportunities for the research community to collaborate in real time on overlapping areas of research interests. “Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we’ll face in this century,” said Gaurav. “Climate change research is going to be crucial to finding the solutions we need. To that end, it is imperative that we find ways to enable higher levels of collaboration within the research community but also between them and the wider set of stakeholders, such as governments, businesses and donors.”
Bridging the gap For the first phase, the platform will create an online directory of PhD researchers working on climate change across the globe. It will be built bottom-up by researchers who can enter their information and edit or delete it anytime, offering important elements of authenticity and up-todateness to the portal. Through this directory, anyone can look up ongoing climate change research using keywords, researcher name, countries, cities and other variables as filters. “The idea is to create a platform whereby within a few clicks, you could find out, at any given moment who all across the world is conducting Left: Guarav Dubey. Photo: Jack Evans
