OGC Calls for Participation in Climate Resilience Pilot

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has released a Call for Participation (CFP) to solicit proposals for the OGC Climate Resilience Pilot, a collaborative activity recognizing geospatial climate information use cases, services and visualization capabilities available, and important next steps. Selected participants will be provided funding for their time and effort through OGC’s own Strategic Members. The call for participants ends on November 18, 2022, and is available on the Climate Resilience Pilot webpage. [NB: An earlier version of this press release contained a link to the CFP that has since expired. A new link has been provided.]

The pilot will be the first phase of multiple long term climate activities aiming to evolve geospatial data, technologies, and other capabilities into valuable information for decision makers, scientists, policy makers, data providers, software developers, and service providers so we can make valuable, informed decisions to improve climate action. The goal is to help the location community develop more powerful visualization and communication tools to accurately address ongoing climate threats such as heat, drought, floods, fires as well as supporting the national determined contributions for greenhouse gas emission reduction. Climate resilience is often considered the use case of our lifetime, and the OGC community is uniquely positioned to accelerate solutions through collective problem solving with this initiative.

The OGC Climate Resilience Community has a vision to support climate actions and enable international partnerships (SDG 17), and move towards global interoperable open digital infrastructures providing climate resilience information on users demand. This pilot will contribute to establishing an OGC climate resilience concept store for the community where all appropriate climate information to build climate resilience information systems as open infrastructures can be found in one place. These major challenges can only be met through the combined efforts of many OGC members across government, industry, and academia.

Interested organizations are invited to submit their use-case suggestions. During the pilot, these use-cases will be demonstrated and assessed collaboratively against a set of Research Questions defined in the Call for Participation. These questions allow aspects regarding data availability, integration, processing, and visualization to be evaluated consistently across all use cases. Together, the use cases will allow us to better understand and equip future Climate Resilience Information Systems (CRIS) and resilience frameworks. They allow us to identify interoperability issues and data integration challenges and pave the way for future collaborative solution development and open infrastructures.

Organizations interested in participating in the activity must be OGC members, and are encouraged to contact innovation@ogc.org to discuss Pilot extensions and future initiative options. If an organization is not an OGC Member, they can become one at www.ogc.org/join, or reach out to innovation@ogc.org to discuss options. 

• November 18, 2022 Close of Call for Participation
• January 13, 2022 Kick-Off Workshop
• February, 2023 Demonstration event at OGC Member Meeting Climate Resilience DWG (Dubai)
• May 31, 2023 Delivery of final Engineering Reports
• June 2023 End of Phase Workshop (in person meeting, tentatively colocated with OGC Member Meeting in Huntsville, Alabama, USA); Official end of the project
• July 2023 Call for participation for next initiatives

OGC's Innovation Program is a collaborative, agile, and hands-on prototyping and engineering environment where sponsors and OGC members come together to address location interoperability challenges while validating international open standards. To learn about the benefits of sponsoring an OGC Innovation Program Initiative such as this, visit the OGC Innovation Program webpage, or watch this short video on how OGC’s Innovation Program can benefit your organization.

At the recent OGC Member Meeting in Singapore, the Climate Resilience DWG approved three new Working Group Chairs: Ryan Ahola (Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)), Angel Lopez (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF)), and Allan Jamieson (Ordnance Survey UK). Representative Chairs from other continents are encouraged to join in the future.

Further information about the multi-year Pilot, including the Call For Participation, is available on the OGC Climate Resilience Pilot webpage. Responses are due November 18, 2022.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a collective problem-solving community of more than 550 experts representing industry, government, research and academia, collaborating to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. 

The global OGC Community engages in a mix of activities related to location-based technologies: developing consensus-based open standards and best-practices; collaborating on problem solving in agile innovation initiatives; participating in member meetings, events, and workshops; and more. OGC's unique standards development process moves at the pace of innovation, with constant input from technology forecasting, practical prototyping, real-world testing, and community engagement.

OGC bridges disparate sectors, domains, and technology trends, and encourages the cross-pollination of ideas between different communities of practice to improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating an inclusive and sustainable future.