Icebreaker One brings together the public and private sectors to unlock the innovation and finance needed to address our climate and biodiversity emergencies.
Our ability to use existing and emerging data to address our environmental crises is currently stifled: we need better ways to share data. The inhibitor is not technology but culture: organisations are stuck in legacy models that mandate that they hold everything ‘closed’ and negotiate potential uses of their data on a case-by-case basis.
This holds back innovation: data is not discoverable, it is not clearly licensed for use, it is not in formats that people can easily manipulate.
Building on transdisciplinary partnerships, and decades of experience with open standards, data governance, mass collaboration, and public-private-community partnerships, Icebreaker One will unlock the flow of decision-critical data exchange to enable a multi-$trillion shift in climate-resilient infrastructure investment. It will create private goods: enabling businesses to make money, save money and reduce risk. Equally, it will create public goods: enabling nations to protect their society, environment and economy.
Priorities as a partner of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data
Icebreaker One directly supports activity of eight of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and, by improving global access to data, it will support direct progress against more than 20 targets by mobilizing finance for resilient infrastructure. It will have a meaningful impact on the ability of countries to report their progress against the global goals and the Sendai Framework, by improving data availability on mitigation strategies and infrastructure.
Icebreaker One is focused on the cultural mechanics of data publishing: developing common principles and practice. It builds on existing work (e.g., geospatial), bringing together existing initiatives and organisations to demonstrate the investment case for development and on specific interventions, such as data licensing, that require collective action.
By bringing together data-sharing know-how from decades of work on the Web, working to create a common language and create shared values between people from a wide range of sectors, we aim to accelerate progress and reboot previous stalled efforts for data exchange.