SIGIR 2025 will host a workshop to explore challenges in information retrieval development to help understand climate impact. This is the second edition of the workshop. The focus of this year’s edition of the workshop will be on climate adaptation tracking.
Last year’s edition of this workshop focused on identifying the challenges of developing and using scalable systematic review methodologies for aggregating scientific information on climate and climate
change to help inform policy-making. This year, we build on insights gained last year to add a focus
on adaptation strategies, which is necessitated by the escalating climate crisis. Here, adaptation refers to “[t]he process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects in order to mod-
erate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities”. Accordingly, the effective tracking of adaptation initiatives assumes paramount importance. Comprehensive overviews of adaptation efforts facilitate valuable knowledge exchange among communities, enabling informed resource allocation and prioritization of critical needs. Recent research on generative approaches to information retrieval and natural language processing has opened up avenues to jointly model and optimize complex retrieval-plus-downstream-task pipelines. As part of the special theme, we will examine the potential of sequence-to-sequence learning approaches for adaptation tracking. We will also discuss the challenges and limitations of these approaches and how they can be overcome.
The purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue for discussing, compiling, and updating a research agenda for IR for climate impact. We will bring together researchers, applied researchers, and practitioners in climate impact, information retrieval, information extraction, and systematic reviews to gain a broader understanding of the information retrieval and extraction challenges faced in climate impact.
The web site for MANILA25 will be available soon at https://sites.google.com/view/ir-for-climate-impact/home.