NERC’s environmental data—on weather, soil, water, air quality, and ecosystems—is scattered across dozens of databases, each with its own format and access rules, making it hard for anyone outside specialist research to use. The Digital Solutions Hub will build a single, user-friendly online gateway that connects these datasets and adds toolkits for analysing them. This matters because organisations that could put the data to work—local councils planning flood defences, NHS trusts mapping heatwave risks, transport agencies designing resilient roads, insurers pricing climate risk—often lack the time or expertise to find and combine the relevant information. The Hub will integrate NERC data with social, economic, and health datasets, so a planner could, for example, overlay flood maps with population density and hospital locations in one step. If successful, the Hub will improve decision-making across government, infrastructure, housing, and health sectors, helping the UK adapt to climate change and manage environmental risks without requiring users to become data scientists themselves.
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We are building a Digital Solutions Hub (Hub) as a gateway to a broad set of inter-connected toolkits that facilitate improved access and better use of NERC data. The digital platform will have especially broad impacts on the environment, society and the economy by facilitating easier access and use of NERC data in business, government and society. Working with our partners, who are the users of what we build, will help grow its use and dissemination. The Hub will be integrated with wider social, economic, health and environmental datasets, to support decision making across a range of sectors. For stakeholders, the Hub will be the user-facing entry point that allows them to explore what NERC offers, ensuring that data and toolkits are findable and accessible. Data science, and the integration it requires, are highly complex and constantly evolving. Our approach recognises that computational tools need to 'sit' in the appropriate place in the technical ecosystem, and that users, particularly those who are new, must be supported in using and accessing them. We will be working with a range of partners in local and national government, the private sector, technology sector, infrastructure providers, health sector, transportation, urban and regional planning, environmental science and a whole range of local and national agencies we will facilitate improved decision making in a wide range of sectors. The Hub will benefit society by improving decision makers' ability to make informed decisions through the integration of data that have potential benefits for the future prosperity of the UK. This ranges from local to national government, the NHS, utility sector, transport infrastructure, insurance industry, housing developers as well as individual members of society. Providing easier access to NERC's environmental data offers opportunities to improving peoples' health and better understanding the impacts of climate change on people, land and property across the UK.
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