2nd GEOSS Science and Technology Stakeholder Workshop GEOSS: Supporting Science for the Millennium Development Goals and Beyond Bonn, Germany, August 28—31, 2012

Breakout Session B6: Science-Policy-Interface

Conveners: Peter Haugan, Kathleen Fontaine, Hans-Peter Plag

This Breakout session will look at what GEO/GEOSS can do to help improve the science-policy or science-decision-making interface. We are in an era of unprecedented access to both scientific research-related and applications-related data and information, but along with that access comes challenges. The communication of science results and science assessment to policy makers and other decision makers, which today often happens through scientific literature which is often interpreted by science journalists, and through assessment reports, is an issue where many problems complicate the dialog, including the communication of uncertainties. A relevant question is what role GEO/GEOSS could play in this communication. An example is IPCC and the C2SE (http://www.c2es.org/), where the communication of the assessment is led by an organization other than the one that did the assessment. One question could be whether, in light of the processes followed by IPCC and others, GEO has a role in an Earth observations assessment process, and if so, what might that be? Another question is what infrastructure could help to improve/build a successful interface. In addressing the question of how and where the various communities access their data and models, it is often stated that there is a disconnect between the providers and the users. Is this the case? If so, why, and what steps could GEO take through GEOSS to reduce the disconnect?