Information Retrieval for Climate Impact
Maarten de Rijke, Bart van den Hurk, Flora Salim, Alaa Al Khourdajie, Nan Bai, Renato Calzone, Declan Curran, Getnet Demil, Lesley Frew, Noah Gießing, Mukesh Kumar Gupta, Maria Heuss, Sanaa Hobeichi, David Huard, Jingwei Kang, Ana Lucic, Tanwi Mallick, Shruti Nath, Andrew Okem, Barbara Pernici, Thilina Rajapakse, Hira Saleem, Harry Scells, Nicole Schneider, Damiano Spina, Yuanyuan Tian, Edmund Totin, Andrew Trotman, Ramamurthy Valavandan, Dereje Workneh, Yangxinyu Xie
TL;DR
This paper defines the information retrieval needs for climate impact assessment, centering IPCC WGII workflows and the challenge of synthesizing an ever-growing, diverse literature base. It proposes an open, transparent evidence-synthesis agenda that integrates grey literature, Indigenous Knowledge, and multi-modal data while prioritizing fairness, provenance, and energy-aware AI use. The methodology emphasizes adapting systematic-review practices to climate-relevant workflows, leveraging shared resources, benchmarks, and living evidence to maintain up-to-date assessments. The work highlights practical pathways and risks for adopting IR tools within policy-relevant climate assessments, aiming to enable timely, credible, and equitable decision support for climate adaptation and resilience.
Abstract
The purpose of the MANILA24 Workshop on information retrieval for climate impact was to bring together researchers from academia, industry, governments, and NGOs to identify and discuss core research problems in information retrieval to assess climate change impacts. The workshop aimed to foster collaboration by bringing communities together that have so far not been very well connected -- information retrieval, natural language processing, systematic reviews, impact assessments, and climate science. The workshop brought together a diverse set of researchers and practitioners interested in contributing to the development of a technical research agenda for information retrieval to assess climate change impacts.