Introducing RFF Data Commons

RFF’s mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. In pursuit of that mission, RFF helps to steward numerous economic models, data sets, and analysis tools used globally to improve public- and private-sector decisionmaking. In collaboration with Data Commons, one of the world’s largest open knowledge databases, we have launched RFF Data Commons as a means of sharing our data and analysis with a larger audience than ever before. We aim to provide students, researchers, journalists, and decisionmakers with easy access to critical climate and environmental data, empowering them to make informed decisions for a better future.

About Data Commons

Publicly available data from open sources are vital resources for students and researchers in a variety of disciplines. Unfortunately, processing these data sets is often tedious and cumbersome. Organizations follow distinctive practices for codifying data sets. Combining data from different sources requires mapping common entities and resolving different types of keys and identifiers. This process is time consuming, tedious, and requires constant iteration. Data Commons addresses these problems by synthesizing a single graph from these different data sources. Data Commons links references to the same entities across different data sets to nodes on the graph, so that users can access data about a particular entity aggregated from different sources without data cleaning or joining.

Who can use it?

RFF Data Commons can be accessed by anyone via the tools available on datacommons.rff.org. Students, researchers, and developers can use the REST, Python, and Google Sheets APIs, all of which are free for educational, academic, and journalistic research purposes.