Provide country-level historical data for variables

[orichters]

I talked to @phackstock at the NGFS meeting, and within many model comparison exercises, we face the problem that even historical data differs.

We asked ourselves whether it would be worth setting up a database with historical data, where we could collect historical data (best on the country level) from different (open) sources for the variables we discuss here. That would make it much easier to harmonize at least the historical data in our models.

Just an idea, maybe also not best discussed here, but I wanted to put it somewhere.

[danielhuppmann]

That’s a great idea, and we‘d be happy to spin up a database for such reference data. As a complement, it would also be useful to implement packages or workflows to query third-party databases and convert the data to the IAMC format. For example, pyam already includes methods to read data from the UNFCCC data inventory and some World Bank sources, see https://pyam-iamc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/database.html