GEO/EuroGEO advocation progress in Arctic issues to EO community

Arctic PASSION as an EU action to improve the Arctic Observing System in a holistic way, has developed this by collaborating in many connections to non-European actors. This task has been driven ahead from Work package 6 as the international collaboration arm of the Arctic Passion project. The means have been various interactions in the many different communities involved. This report describes the actions taken in relation to the Group on Earth Observation (GEO). Over the past 20 years, GEO has evolved from coordinating data sharing to championing Earth Intelligence, ensuring that Earth observations (as in all our means to observe our planets state) are not only accessible but also transformed into actionable knowledge. In Europe GEO is organized as EuroGEO, coordinated by a secretariat and lead by the European Commission. As one of the main objectives of Arctic Passion, The European Commission wanted to see the community activity ArcticGEOSS lead by SAON to develop into a GEO initiative.

Arctic PASSION pursued this objective by advocating in GEO in two directions:

i) to activate more Arctic researchers to get involved with the Group on Earth Observations’ (GEO) worldwide network and

ii) encourage better recognition of the challenges facing the Arctic by GEO.

Advocating GEO is happening also via two routes as the project strengthens EuroGEO, the European regional structure, and Arctic GEOSS, the dedicated GEO community activity that tried to be recognized as a GEO initiative and has been able to assume status as a new form of activity – the GEO Convenor in the post-2025 GEO work program. This new form is tailor-made for networks of many institutions developing EO services for a wide range of end users.  This ensures GEO recognition, but this does not entail support for communications or funding. But it does better reflect the nature of Arctic GEOSS, which is a network of many active research and service institutions working for the wellbeing of the Arctic.

The Arctic GEOSS convener can propose for some of our services to become a GEO initiative, but the GEO secretariat wants for GEO initiatives to concentrate on 2-3 services at best, but Arctic Passion was developing 8 and some more  are developed by partners inside and out of Arctic Passion.  Progress in Arctic PASSION has been a great jumping pad for growing more GEO activities for the Arctic.