GEO Symposium China - GEO Blue Planet

From Vision to Action: Crafting GEO’s Post 2025 Implementation Plan at the GEO Symposium

The GEO Symposium and Open Data & Open Knowledge Workshop (ODOK) took place in  Hangzhou, China, between September 23 and 26, 2024. Consisting of plenary sessions, parallel sessions, posters, and live demos, the event focused on developing the GEO Post-2025 strategy into a detailed Implementation Plan and enhancing collaboration among GEO Work Programme activities.

GEO Blue Planet presented their work at three parallel sessions.

Holistic nutrient monitoring

At the Parallel Session, “Water and Land Sustainability, Natalie Lerma, a 2024 John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellow at GEO Blue Planet, joined fellow panellists to discuss the interdependencies between water and land sustainability and the role of Earth Observations for effective and integrated land-water management and conservation strategies. Natalie presented the concept of a holistic source-to-sea nutrient monitoring system.

With pollution crossing land and water boundaries, the nutrient pollution crisis is one of the most pressing land-water sustainability issues. Since 2018, GEO Blue Planet has been working with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on the monitoring of coastal eutrophication, direct evidence of nutrient pollution. With this new activity, GEO Blue Planet aims to convene the GEO Work Programme to deliver cross boundary monitoring to inform countries in developing actionable, evidence-based policy interventions and assessing the effectiveness of policies. This effort will support the UNEP Global Partnership on Nutrient Management (GPNM) and Working Group on Nitrogen, and especially Sri Lanka and Trinidad and Tobago chosen as pilot countries to develop national action plans to combat nutrient pollution.

The GEO Blue Planet Eutrophication working group will lead the marine component of this cross-GEO initiative to deliver this holistic source-to-sea nutrient monitoring system.

As a first milestone, GEO Blue Planet is organising a strategic planning workshop, “Nutrient Monitoring across the GEO Work Programme”, which will be held on January 5, 2025, in Paris, France.

Earth Observation in National Adaptation Plans

GEO Blue Planet’s Dr Louis Celliers, who works at Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS) of Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, joined the Parallel Session “Co-developing National Adaptation Plans with Regional GEOs and National GEOs.” The session, which consisted of a moderated panel discussion, focused on the dynamics, opportunities, and requirements for supporting the uptake of Earth observation in climate National Adaptation Plans.

Initiated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), National Adaptation Plans aim to help Least Developed Countries address medium-to long-term climate adaptation needs. National Adaptation Plans focus on building adaptive capacity and resilience, and facilitating the integration of climate change adaptation into existing and new policies, programs, and other activities.

Louis presented a GEO Blue Planet-Hereon report created as supplementary material for the National Adaptation Plans reporting focused on the use of Earth Observation for coastal adaptation. Louis highlighted that an estimated one billion people will live in low-lying coastal areas by the middle of the century. Yet, coastal areas haven’t been given the same attention as areas further inland in National Adaptation Plans. The report offers guidance designed to help coastal countries in using Earth Observation to adapt to climate change.

One ocean, one health

At the One Health Parallel Session, Natalie Lerma discussed the link between ocean health and human health and how GEO Blue Planet supports One Health. The One Health Initiative calls for “the collaborative efforts of multiple disciplines working locally, nationally, and globally, to attain optimal health for people, animals and our environment.”

Natalie highlighted the GEO Blue Planet thematic action areas focusing on oil spills, nutrient pollution, and marine plastics. These impacts threaten human and marine life in multiple ways. Threats include toxins, degrading and destroying marine habitats, marine invasive species, creating entanglement risks, and depleting oxygen. From a human health perspective, these threaten food security and present food and water quality and safety risks. By monitoring the marine ecosystems and thus supporting a healthy environment, we can support healthy human life.

More broadly, the Session also explored connections and collaborations between various Geo Work Programme Activities and One Health, including the GEO HEALTH activity EO4HEALTH, which focuses on the role of Earth observation in advancing our knowledge of threats to human, animal and ecosystem health, and supporting response actions. EO4HEALTH and the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEOBON) will participate in GEO Blue Planet’s upcoming “Nutrient Monitoring Across the GEO Work Programme Workshop”.

Knowledge and data sharing were also on the agenda. EO4HEALTH will share lessons they’ve learned in dealing with health data and the sensitivity required. In addition, GEO Work Programme activities will work on facilitating the sharing of specific social and economic datasets relating to public health and integrating them with Earth observation data to develop One Health Solutions.