Climate85 API: Easy Access to Complex Geospatial Information

Author: David Sheehy

With the launch of the climate85 API our users can have direct access to our geospatial data on our easy-to-use platform. They can get direct datapoints on their addresses and locations which can be used for a plethora of analysis. The question of why we built the API and how we got here is important to understand. After all, accessing such complex data is never that simple.

Our team at Minerva has always been passionate about understanding climate change and its impact to our societies and organizations. We developed the datasets with the goal of helping others understand that impact. Still, even after working with the different climate models and developing our datapoints we faced yet another hurdle. Geospatial information is not simple; not only is it stored in a completely unique environment with multiple dimensions, but it also includes multiple variables that we had to frame in order to make an easy to access delivery system. We needed to classify and categorise this data based on certain criteria depending on the climate variable. We also needed to make this data easily accessible to users who are both technical and non-technical.

This is where the API comes in. The API makes it possible for that complex geospatial information to be easily categorized and accessed by the end user. The API was built using the FastAPI framework built in Python. The framework allows to rapidly build our required endpoints, as well as, automatically document those endpoints. It generates a UI using Swagger UI which allows us to present that documentation in an interactive format. This results in the best fit for all our business requirements, as it allows us to:

• Build endpoints which allow users to easily query our climate rasters (maps)
• Construct an API response that gives context around the data the user queried
• Document all the endpoints in an easy-to-use and interactive format

This makes it so that organizations don’t need a dedicated geospatial data engineer to access our database. Now, you the user, no longer need to be a geospatial specialist to use and manage geospatial data on climate risk. The API takes us one step closer of our goal of making climate risk data easily accessible for everyone. We look forward to the continued improvement and update of our API to make it even easier and informative to all our users.

If you have any comments or suggestions regarding our API system and the climate85 platform, please let us know through (contact us link)

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