To kick off the GEO Virtual Symposium 2020, we will open with a welcome address and remarks from the GEO Secretariat Director. This session will provide an introduction and overview of sessions from members of the GEO Programme Board. Lastly, we will highlight the Symposium Logistics to ensure that participants benefit fully from the series of virtual meetings throughout the week.

Earth observations offer real-time information that can advance scientific inquiry, inform health decision-making, and enhance interventions to address emerging global health challenges. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the GEO community has taken action to leverage global expertise, share resources, and discuss priorities and challenges across geographic regions. This session will highlight the value of this global network, present scientific approaches and preliminary findings, and provide recommendations that support Earth observations for public health applications.

The GEO engagement priorities guide a number of GWP activities. The policy aspects of the engagement priorities are driven and supported by UN agencies and international organisations, such as UNFCCC, UNDRR, UNCCD, UN-HABITAT, UN FAO, UNDP and UNEP. These UN bodies are not only developing and shaping international policy, but in many cases they are the custodian or lead agencies for topics that are fundamental to the success of the GWP. Understanding whom, how and when to engage these agencies and other international organisations is important to help GEO support UN Member States. It cuts across many of GEO’s activities from capacity development to resource mobilisation, as well as outreach and international policy development. Speakers will present concrete examples of collaboration from the GWP, this will include speakers from UN agencies and GWP activity leads.

Flagships and Initiatives of the GEO Work Programme are in a central position to provide reproducible knowledge to achieve a results-oriented GEOSS. Learn how they are amplifying EO-based solutions at the local/national level to scale up for implementation in other regions around the world, thus allowing these solutions to “go global.” In this session, the GWP activity leads are invited to demonstrate their experience in sharing data, codes and other materials that are essential to reproduce knowledge through various platforms including the GEO Knowledge Hub.

In the form of a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), this session will answer questions that are submitted to the GEO Programme Board Co-Chair members via Slido chat. Specifically, this session will provide guidance to GEO Work Programme leads to ensure the successful delivery of the 2020-2022 GEO Work Programme.

The wide availability and accessibility of open data, coupled with new technologies related to data processing systems and services, provides a great opportunity for the GEO community to transform data and information into decision-supporting knowledge in a most efficient way. Speakers will demonstrate how Data cubes are applied to produce results.

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The Group on Earth Observations is undertaking a Mid-Term Evaluation to assess the progress in achieving the aims of the GEO Strategic Plan 2016-2025. Members from the MTE Team will present their approach and preliminary results from their review. They will be available to answer questions from participants and the discussion will provide the evaluation team with inputs directly from the GEO community.

In order to ensure that a demand-driven and impact-oriented Capacity Development methodology is applied within the GEO work programme, there is an expressed need to also strengthen the capacities and capabilities of the contributors to the GEO work programme. This session is aimed to share examples on how the GEO Flagships, Initiatives and Regional GEO’s organise and develop their capacity development programme in a co-design process and how this contributes to a results-oriented GEOSS.

The Regional GEOs, evolving from the Regional GEOSS Initiatives, have been expected to play a strong role in user engagement, resource mobilization, as well as scaling GEO global activities to a regional level. This session will review some examples of mutually-beneficial interaction between Regional GEOs and GEO Flagships, Initiatives or Community Activities, with the aim of identifying good practices for other activities that may be interested in expanding their impact in new regions.

This session aims at discussing how to joint effort between GEO flagships and initiatives and the four regional GEOs. The four regional GEOs will start their presentations with an outline of each of them and illustrate with concrete examples some of the mutually beneficial interactions they have established with the GEO activities. They should as well cover the question “Why Regional?” and the unique benefits of acting regionally.

Those interactions can go in both directions, downscaling GEO activities to specific regions and contexts or bringing local and regional knowledge to the attention of the GEO community. In addition to examples stemming from the GEO flagships, initiatives and community activities, there will be additional examples covering the GEOSS infrastructure and how regional GEOs can integrate themselves in its architecture.

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Earth Observation (EO) data has proven to contain powerful information for the monitoring of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere on a global, regional, and local scale, in particular by providing significant information on coastal regions. The exploitation of EO data combined with in-situ data for water and coastal applications has significantly increased in recent years and has been the topic of various international publications. This session will aim to highlight the integration and applicability of these datasets to address coastal issues including the demonstration of tangible examples on how it has been utilized by GEO initiatives.

The concept of Essential Variables (EVs) has been increasingly used in Earth observation communities to identify those variables that correspond to high impact on the Earth system and should be a priority for monitoring. This session is aimed to take a horizontal perspective on the good practices and lessons learned on how the various sets of EVs are developed, accepted and used by their respective communities.

GEO’s ability to support global environmental and sustainable development agendas requires continuous funding to ensure long term results for GWP activities. Participants will learn about the GEO Resource Mobilization Strategy, and will hear from GWP activities and their experiences in obtaining funding and in-kind resources, including lessons learned and good practice to follow. The session will also cover different funding sources, steps in contacting funders, how to align with topics most likely to be funded, and other practical advice.

Report back from session facilitators on conclusions and action points.