The need for data integration to address the challenges of climate change on the Guyana coast

Abstract

Guyana's capacity to address the impacts of climate change on its coastal environment requires the ability to monitor, quantify and understand coastal change over short-, mediumand longterm. Understanding the drivers of change in coastal and marine environment can be achieved through the accurate measurement and critical analyses of morphologies, flows, processes and responses. This manuscript presents a strategy developed to create a central resource, database and web-based platform to integrate data and information on the drivers and the changes within Guyana coastal and marine environment. The strategy involves four complimentary work packages including data collection, development of a platform for data integration, application of the data for coastal change analyses and consultation with stakeholders. The last aims to assess the role of the integrated data systems to support strategic governance and sustainable decision-making. It is hoped that the output of this strategy would support the country's climate-focused agencies, organisations, decision-makers, and researchers in their tasks and endeavours.

Keywords

Climate adaptation / Climate mitigation / Data needs / Data integration / Web-based platform

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Temitope D. Timothy Oyedotun: Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing - review & editing. Helene Burningham: Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We appreciate United Nations Development Programme - Indonesia and Archipelagic & Island States (AIS) Forum for the 2021 Archipelagic & Island States Innovation Challenges Award given for this idea on Joint Research Programme in Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation.

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