A new online learning resource developed by CMCC within the European Adaptation AGORA project helps stakeholders and non-specialists navigate climate data, understand its limitations and find the tools they need to work with climate information.

Climate data, indicators, risk assessments and adaptation tools are spread across an ever-growing number of platforms, creating a valuable resource for experts but a complex landscape for non-specialists to navigate. There is no shortage of climate information; the challenge is knowing where to look, what to trust and how to make sense of what we find.

This is where the Digital Academy, developed within the Adaptation AGORA project and now integrated into CMCC’s Dataclime platform, comes in. The Academy connects existing climate resources with learning materials and opportunities for users to provide feedback.

The idea took shape through consultation with researchers, professionals, students, citizens and decision-makers, whose input helped shape the Academy throughout its development. One of the most useful observations was also one of the simplest: making data accessible is relatively easy; making learning accessible is much harder.

That insight led to a stronger focus on the educational side of the Academy. Its modules cover topics ranging from the basics of climate and climate change to climate models, risk and adaptation, as well as newer areas such as artificial intelligence and digital twins.

“The most frequent user request was for simpler, less technical language,” says CMCC’s Principal Scientist Paola Mercogliano. “Moving from simply providing data to helping users understand how to use it is a more challenging step: it means enabling them to recognise where the data come from, understand how they were produced, assess their spatial and temporal scale, and know what questions they can be used to answer.”

The Academy also includes an inventory of 192 climate tools and platforms, identified through a review of scientific and institutional sources and refined through stakeholder feedback. The resources cover a broad range of topics, from climate data and risk assessment to adaptation, with information to help users understand what each tool offers and whether it fits their needs.

“Translating complex scientific concepts into language that is accessible to a wider audience, without losing scientific rigour, was not always easy,” says CMCC researcher Davide Dansero. “Terms such as hazard, vulnerability, risk and resilience, for example, can have different meanings depending on the discipline or context, which is why we paid particular attention to how they were defined.”

For example, one of the hardest concepts to communicate is uncertainty. Climate models and scenarios have limitations: they cannot predict the future with certainty, but they remain essential tools for exploring how climate could evolve under different conditions.

The Digital Academy potential users are diverse: a local government technician starting a climate risk assessment, a teacher, a student, a professional working on resilience, or simply someone trying to understand which climate information to trust. The goal is to help them find authoritative sources, ask better questions and use climate information more confidently.

The Academy is intended to keep evolving, and feedback from users is already helping identify improvements, and future data and interactions will help shape new content and updates.