These Terms of Use explain how CLIMAP may be accessed and used, how accounts are managed, and how data and content submitted to the platform must be handled. By accessing CLIMAP, requesting an account, submitting information, downloading materials, or using platform services, you agree to comply with these Terms.
1. Purpose and scope
CLIMAP is a climate impact monitoring and analysis platform for West and Central Africa. It supports the responsible collection, review, consolidation, analysis, publication, and sharing of operational information related to climate-related hazards and humanitarian response.
The platform is intended for public information products, approved humanitarian contributors, and authorized OCHA or partner users working on activities coordinated, supported, or validated through CLIMAP governance arrangements.
2. Eligibility and accounts
Some parts of CLIMAP are public. Contributor workspaces, review tools, messaging, support, dashboards, data export features, and administrative functions require an approved account.
- You must provide accurate registration and profile information and keep it up to date.
- Partner, contributor, manager, and administrator accounts may be subject to validation by an authorized focal point.
- You are responsible for protecting your credentials and for activity carried out through your account.
- CLIMAP administrators may suspend, restrict, deactivate, or delete accounts that are inactive, compromised, no longer authorized, or used in violation of these Terms.
3. Acceptable use
You may use CLIMAP only for lawful, authorized, humanitarian, coordination, information management, preparedness, analysis, or public information purposes aligned with the platform mission.
You must not use CLIMAP to:
- interfere with, overload, scan, disrupt, or compromise the platform or another user's access;
- upload malicious code, attempt unauthorized access, bypass permissions, or misuse API tokens;
- submit intentionally false, misleading, defamatory, discriminatory, or harmful content;
- publish or expose sensitive, personal, protected, confidential, or security-sensitive information without authorization and safeguards;
- use CLIMAP materials in a way that misrepresents OCHA, the United Nations, a partner organization, or affected communities.
4. Data responsibility
CLIMAP users must manage data safely, ethically, and effectively throughout the data lifecycle. This applies to personal data and to non-personal data that may be sensitive in a humanitarian context, including geospatial data, incident information, vulnerability indicators, operational presence, assessment findings, and contextual analysis.
Before submitting, importing, publishing, or sharing data through CLIMAP, you are responsible for ensuring that:
- the data is necessary and proportionate for the intended humanitarian purpose;
- the source, methodology, time period, geographic scope, and known limitations are documented where relevant;
- data quality, accuracy, and timeliness have been reviewed to the extent feasible;
- sensitive details are minimized, aggregated, anonymized, pseudonymized, or otherwise protected when appropriate;
- sharing restrictions, consent requirements, information sharing protocols, or data sharing agreements are respected;
- the data does not create foreseeable protection, security, reputational, operational, or do-no-harm risks for affected people, humanitarian workers, partners, or communities.
5. Privacy and user information
CLIMAP may process information needed to operate the platform, manage accounts, authenticate users, provide support, secure the service, maintain audit logs, generate operational analytics, and communicate with users. This may include account details, organization and role information, contact details, access logs, IP address, browser or device metadata, submitted content, messages, support requests, and usage events.
Public browsing should generally require limited information, but some technical logs are collected automatically to operate, secure, and improve the service. Where you choose not to provide required account or contribution information, some platform features may not be available.
User contact details and account metadata should be accessed only by authorized personnel with a need to manage CLIMAP, provide support, review data workflows, investigate misuse, or meet accountability and security obligations.
6. Submitted content and published materials
You remain responsible for the information, comments, messages, files, event records, analytical inputs, and other content you submit. By submitting content, you confirm that you are authorized to provide it and that it may be processed within CLIMAP for review, consolidation, analysis, publication, archiving, reporting, and other platform purposes consistent with these Terms.
Public materials made available through CLIMAP may be viewed, downloaded, referenced, and used for humanitarian, non-commercial, research, analysis, coordination, and public information purposes, subject to any specific license, attribution, sensitivity, or sharing restrictions shown with the material.
Maps, boundaries, place names, figures, dashboards, and analyses published through CLIMAP do not imply any opinion concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city, area, authority, or the delimitation of frontiers or boundaries.
7. Review, moderation, and removal
CLIMAP administrators, reviewers, and authorized focal points may review accounts, submissions, forms, comments, messages, documents, metadata, API activity, and published outputs to support data quality, data responsibility, security, moderation, and compliance with these Terms.
Content or accounts may be edited, unpublished, restricted, archived, deleted, or escalated where they are inaccurate, duplicate, outdated, unauthorized, harmful, security-sensitive, inconsistent with data responsibility standards, or otherwise contrary to these Terms or applicable OCHA guidance.
8. Security and service integrity
CLIMAP uses technical and organizational safeguards designed to protect platform data and service availability. No digital service can be guaranteed to be uninterrupted, error-free, or immune from unauthorized access.
If you become aware of a suspected vulnerability, unauthorized access, exposed data, compromised account, or other security incident involving CLIMAP, you must report it promptly to the platform team and avoid further access, disclosure, or testing unless expressly authorized.
9. API and automated access
API tokens and automated access are restricted to approved users and organizations. Tokens must be kept confidential, scoped to authorized purposes, rotated or revoked when no longer needed, and never embedded in public code, shared repositories, public dashboards, client-side scripts, or unsecured systems.
Automated access must respect rate limits, authentication requirements, data sharing restrictions, and any additional instructions provided by CLIMAP administrators. CLIMAP may throttle, suspend, revoke, or block automated access that creates operational risk or violates these Terms.
10. Disclaimers
CLIMAP content is provided for humanitarian information management, coordination, analysis, and public information purposes. Although reasonable efforts are made to support quality and responsible review, CLIMAP does not guarantee that all content is complete, accurate, current, suitable for a specific purpose, or free from error.
Users are responsible for their own interpretation, use, onward sharing, and decisions based on CLIMAP content. Nothing in these Terms or on the platform constitutes a waiver, express or implied, of any privileges or immunities of the United Nations.
11. Changes and contact
CLIMAP may update these Terms as the platform, governance model, data responsibility practices, security requirements, or applicable guidance evolves. Material updates should be posted on this page or otherwise communicated through appropriate platform channels.
Questions, account requests, data responsibility concerns, content removal requests, and security reports may be sent to ocha-climap@un.org.
Reference framework
This draft is informed by UN and OCHA public guidance on privacy, responsible humanitarian data management, and platform terms for humanitarian data collection services. It should be adapted to CLIMAP's final governance, hosting, retention, incident management, and publication arrangements before approval.