The proliferation of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs), Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs), and Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) highlights a paradigm shift towards data-driven environmental monitoring and policy. These Essential Variables (EVs) are central to global frameworks including GCOS, WMO, GEO, Copernicus, IPCC assessments, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For science, they are a powerful mechanism to track Earth system changes and enable evidence-based decision-making.
Yet, despite broad recognition, the scientific potential of EVs remains underrealised. Persistent gaps in how they are defined, described, managed, and exchanged across domains and infrastructures hamper progress. A lack of semantic and technical interoperability, inconsistent metadata practices, and fragmented governance limit their integration and reduce their impact on policy and action. Without a coherent, interoperable infrastructure, the transformative potential of EVs—to enable cross-domain science, support climate agreements, and monitor sustainability targets—remains out of reach.
This session will explore the technical, infrastructural, and policy advancements required to make EVs the foundational language for global environmental cooperation. We welcome contributions addressing scientific use cases, technical barriers, and emerging solutions under the following themes:
1. Semantic Interoperability: Shared frameworks and vocabularies (e.g., iADOPT, W3C SSN/SOSA) ensuring EVs form a consistent, machine-actionable common language across disciplines and infrastructures.
2. Cross-Domain Data Synergy: Approaches and case studies demonstrating seamless data flow and integration across atmospheric, oceanic, terrestrial, biodiversity, and socio-economic domains, breaking down silos.
3. Infrastructure Integration: Lessons from research infrastructures (e.g., ENVRI, AuScope, US CRDCs, China’s Earth Lab, GERI) in implementing EVs and achieving interoperability with global programmes like GCOS, WMO, GEO, Copernicus, RDA, and CODATA.
4. From Data to Policy: Examples of how FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) EVs contribute to policy needs, climate reporting, and monitoring of SDG indicators.
We invite scientists, data architects, and policymakers to share insights for building a coherent, actionable, and interoperable global observation system.