{
  "id": 12656236,
  "title": "New climate connectivity taxonomy reveals how different communities talk about climate risk",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/07/new-climate-connectivity-taxonomy-reveals-how-different-communities",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-10-07T15:40:05.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Phys.org",
    "slug": "phys-org",
    "url": "https://phys.org/news/2026-10-climate-taxonomy-reveals-communities.html"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The Climate Connectivity Taxonomy (CC Taxonomy), supported by the EU-funded FAIR2Adapt project, aims to improve climate change adaptation by providing a structured approach to understanding and connecting different terms used across various disciplines. Rapidly growing climate knowledge often leads to confusion due to inconsistent terminology, with adaptation practitioners using terms like \"adaptive capacity,\" while disaster risk specialists may use \"coping capacity\" or \"preparedness.\" These terms share similarities but have distinct meanings based on perspectives, values, disciplines, timescales, and risk understanding approaches. The CC Taxonomy addresses this issue by mapping relationships between related terms while maintaining their unique definitions, enabling users to discover relevant knowledge that might otherwise be missed across different fields. The taxonomy is an AI-assisted and human-curated collection of climate change and disaster risk terms, powering the Climate Connectivity Hub—a tool that aggregates knowledge from platforms such as weADAPT, CORDIS, PreventionWeb, Climate-ADAPT, and the Resilience Platform. This helps researchers, practitioners, and policymakers find, connect, and build upon existing work more efficiently. The CC Taxonomy also supports an interactive glossary on the weADAPT platform, allowing users to hover over highlighted terms to view their definitions. The taxonomy was developed using robust international sources, including the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report glossary and the Hazard Information Profiles from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the International Science Council. AI tools continuously identify new terms from platform content, which human experts verify before addition. The CC Taxonomy was detailed in a peer-reviewed article published in February 2026 in Climatic Change, titled \"Scaling knowledge interoperability for accelerated climate action through the Climate Connectivity Hub and Taxonomy.\" This article emphasizes how taxonomies can enhance FAIR knowledge management for climate change adaptation platforms, facilitating shared understanding, peer-to-peer learning, and accelerated climate action. The open-access API for the taxonomy's version 1 was released in June 2025, allowing other platforms to import the taxonomy and align their vocabulary, fostering interoperability between tools. The latest Hub update in August 2026 includes additional concepts and scope notes to provide better context for term usage across various actors and disciplines. Users can soon contribute new concepts to the taxonomy's ongoing development.",
  "summary": "Climate change adaptation requires rapid, informed decision-making. Yet the knowledge needed to make those decisions is often hard to find, scattered across online platforms and described using inconsistent terminology.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}