The policies and actions that will help move the world to a low-carbon economy and address the large-scale risks associated with climate change are profound and far-reaching. They require many different individuals and groups to take between them a vast array of small and large decisions, every day. Today, those decisions are made with only partial knowledge of the possible options, benefits, costs, and risks. Decision-makers are, in essence, flying blind. Whether acting globally or locally, they lack a trusted decision information infrastructure for mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change.

This lack implies that we need a new way to make collaboration possible. In many ways the solution lies literally at our fingertips. The skin that covers our bodies provides information from ‘sensors’ distributed throughout the body. Nerve endings in the skin gather sensory information and transmit it through the central nervous system for processing. The body responds with appropriate remedial action to regulate and adapt to change.

Planetary Skin can be thought of as a nervous system, covering the entire planet and providing a research and development platform for open collaboration between the public, private, academic and NGO sectors. It will collect data from space, airborne, maritime, terrestrial and people-based sensor networks and other sources of structured and unstructured data. It will model, predict, analyze and report in a standardized usable format over an open and adaptable cloud platform that is governed as a global public-good.

Today, a vast amount of data is collected daily from millions of sources across the globe, and then stored in millions of disparate silos. The proliferation of additional data created by the “Internet of Things”—where all sensors and machines that can be IP-enabled will be—can only grow the amount of data exponentially. So the problem is not the amount of data; it is that the data is isolated from other data and inputs, and cannot provide meaningful insights for decision-making and action with proper local context.