GO-Science has asked the Royal Society to run a 6-month project to produce a report on ‘Optimising the benefits of environmental observation for the UK’ that Sir Martin Sweeting has agreed to Chair and is being over seen by a Core Group of experts.
The project will cover five thematic areas (air, land and freshwater, oceans and ice, climate change and natural hazards) which have been chosen based on priority policy areas for the government.
The output of the project will be a report published by the Royal Society and GO-Science and the target audience for the report is non-specialist policy leaders and drivers across HMG departments. The project will run to the end of the year with the report published in January.
Aims are to consider the current and potential capacity for environmental observations for providing policy relevant information. Hence, it will:
- Investigate the current technology and where it is going in the next 5-10 years
- Present the potential for environmental observation in an accessible (and concise) manner
- Address the social and economic implications for environmental observation in 5 thematic areas – land and freshwater, oceans and ice, air, climate and natural hazards
- Assess the relevance of environmental observation toward the growth agenda in the 5 thematic areas
- Perform a policy and regulatory check against the art of the possible presented in the 5 thematic areas
The project team would like your input to guide the content of a series of expert papers that will form the basis of the report. They ask you submit 5-10 bullet points on the things that you feel it will be most important for the report to address, taking into consideration the format of the project summary.
Further information about the project can be found on the Royal Society website
The Royal Society would appreciate receiving your input by 15 October 2014 and if you have any questions please contact the Project Lead, Elizabeth Bohm