The GEO Ministerial Summit is a high-level gathering to renew GEO Members’ and Participating Organizations’ commitment and support for the GEO vision and mission. During the Summit, ministers and senior officials endorsed the Cape Town Declaration and announced new initiatives and collaborations to improve the use and impact of EO for sustainable development.
Two key outcomes from the Plenary and the Ministerial Summit included the adoption and commitment of in-kind support of the post-2025 Strategy, and the recognition of the Global Ecosystems Atlas as a key tool to implement commitments under the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The Global Ecosystem Atlas builds on existing initiatives and involves key players for biodiversity monitoring.
Additionally, the plenary supported bridging the gap between national, regional and global engagement through a strong National Coordination Mechanism (NCM), which is fundamental to GEO’s Post-2025 Strategy. It encouraged National GEOs to cooperate and leverage resources, with Secretariat support, to enhance their capabilities for mutual benefits and sustainability, and supported Secretariat efforts to strengthen low and middle income countries’ capacities to create and maintain robust NCMs.
Finally, GEO Week provided an opportunity for young people to discuss the use of EO to empower and engage early career researchers toward resolving global problems and reaching the Sustainable Development Goals.
Future Earth recognizes GEO’s role in coordinating the observational community to address a variety of environmental and societal challenges, affording a close collaboration with the government agencies responsible for monitoring and tackling these challenges in each GEO Member State. Our community has collaborated with GEO on a number of GEO initiatives (see Future Earth’s Statement for GEO Week), including GEO BON, GEOGLOWS, GEO Mountains and AquaWatch.
The partnership between ESA and Future Earth is a key mechanism by which Future Earth is building stronger links between EO research activities in our networks and GEO, by funding a program of EO activities to explore research avenues, build capacity and support the development of demonstrator tools. The Joint ESA-Future Earth Program supported the bioDISCOVERY workshop with GEO BON in June 2022.
Dr. Faten Attig Bahar, a member of Future Earth’s Governing Council, has been appointed as a liaison to the GEO post-2025 working group, which comprises 28 people chosen from the GEO community and partners based on the ideals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and tasked to shape GEO’s new strategy.
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