CASE STUDY 4 UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index Articulating the value proposition Children are uniquely vulnerable to climate and environmental hazards such as droughts, floods and severe weather, especially when they live in areas where these risks overlap. As these hazards intensify, UNICEF recognizes the need to identify regions where children are at the greatest risk, so as to facilitate targeted responses to safeguard their well-being. Because of the need to monitor large-scale areas over a long period of time, UNICEF has identified EO to be best suited to understand the risk these particularly vulnerable populations face. Bolstering strategic alignment Leveraging decades of EO data, UNICEF built the Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI). This in-house capability uses EO to model and assess a wide range of climate hazards at the sub-national level, providing comprehensive insights into the climate risks that children, and others around the world, face. UNICEF’s efforts to build an in-house solution began with a clear mandate from the Sustainability and Climate Change Action Plan (SCAP) 2023-2030, which underscored the urgent need for targeted mitigation in order to protect the most vulnerable children from the worst impacts of a changing climate and degrading environment. Charting the execution strategy Following the call to action, UNICEF established a dedicated Climate and Environment Data unit in 2023. They decided to build a tailored EO solution for their internal needs, building upon existing solutions from trusted and established partners. This allowed them to maintain control, customize workflow and integrate with existing systems, which ultimately increased adoption of EO tools across their programmes. This initiative led to UNICEF generating the first comprehensive overview of children’s exposure and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, developed to help prioritize action to support those most at risk. This report compiled geographical data, which highlighted how exposed children are to different climate-related shocks, and ranks countries on a scale of risk, from low to extremely high. With CCRI, UNICEF has the insights needed to strategically protect children, promote climate resilience programmes and empower youth advocacy, all of which support a safer and more sustainable future for the next generation. Determining the level of customization needed EO workflows are not one-size-fits-all. Certain sectors may require highly specialized analytics, such as precision agriculture or coastal monitoring, where customized algorithms track water salinity or crop health. Sometimes, third-party datasets may lack the specificity needed, necessitating custom data acquisition, such as commissioning satellite tasking for specific regions. If third-party datasets are insufficient (e.g. lacking specific spectral bands or time-series resolution), organizations may need to acquire their own high-resolution imagery or collaborate with satellite operators to gather bespoke datasets. Exploring the role of open-source and commercial data and tools Leveraging open-source EO data such as Landsat of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Sentinel satellites of the Copernicus programme, as well as open-source tools such as QGIS, may provide cost-effective alternatives for geospatial data analysis. These datasets and platforms are often sufficient for applications concerning broad scopes and long- term historical trends but may lack the precision required to fully answer the issue at hand. (Precision refers to minimizing the error of a recorded measurement compared to its ground truth measurement, and temporal resolution refers to how often a measurement is captured.) For certain use cases, this level of resolution can be crucial to elevate the data from merely informative to essential for decision-making. An active global community is working to create open-source tools that can be combined to create EO data analysis pipelines. NASA, European Space Agency (ESA) and many commercial satellite companies are funding and contributing staff time to the creation of shared open-source EO resources such as the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL), the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC) specification and the Sensor Tasking API (STAPI). The Executive’s Playbook on Earth Observation: Strategic Insights for a Changing Planet 25

The Executive%E2%80%99s Playbook on Earth Observation