PRISM will strengthen its delivery of impactful tools for WFP’s partners in government through open-source technology that reduces barriers to access and use of climate risk information. This includes improved capabilities to integrate national weather data, easier access to climate trend analysis, more robust analytics, and an operational framework to facilitate anticipatory actions through climate-derived triggers and thresholds.
We plan to create more streamlined tools to integrate local data and to blend it with satellite observations which creates more national ownership and trust in weather monitoring data that takes advantage of satellites.
PRISM will also improve its ability to visualize and analyze climate indicators over time. The ability to work with time-series data on climate indicators is often impeded by technical challenges. PRISM aims to simplify access to time-series data, to facilitate more in-depth risk analysis and more data driven approaches to policy and national planning for climate resilience.
The project is moving towards deeper integration with adaptive social protection systems, also known as shock-responsive social protection (SRSP). In the future PRISM will further improve the types of analysis used to identify those in need and the scale of assistance required by integrating the SHAPES platform, a robust economic impact modeling tool created by WFP.
Looking towards Anticipatory Actions, PRISM’s current capability to monitor climate risks and generate alerts based on user-driven choices on thresholds will be improved. This feature helps to facilitate actions that are customized to local contexts, which are based on triggers and thresholds applied to monitoring data. PRISM will soon support additional types of indicators for monitoring and provide more flexibility for users to create thresholds based on their needs. In addition, the outputs from the triggers will be enhanced to include automated reports. Though not currently implemented, the integration of weather forecast products is also being explored through technical cooperation with scientific partners.
Finally, PRISM continues to optimize features and the user experience through user research and agile software development practices. We invite collaborators with expertise in these areas to contribute to the project.