About PPE

The Eighteenth World Meteorological Congress (June 2019) adopted Geneva Declaration 2019: Building Community for Weather, Climate and Water Actions. This high-level policy act reflects the new paradigms of cooperation and partnership between stakeholders from all sectors of the weather enterprise needed as a collective response to global societal risks related to extreme weather, climate change, water scarcity and other environmental hazards.

Furthermore, the Open Consultative Platform, launched during the 18^th Congress,  serves as a vehicle for sustainable and constructive dialogue between the sectors, by articulating a common vision for the future of the weather enterprise in the coming decade and beyond.

‘People first’ principle

Recognizing the core mandate of supporting local-to-global decisions related to saving life and property and economic productivity by providing essential, meteorological, climatological, hydrological and environmental information, WMO adheres to the “people-first” approach to public-private engagement and partnerships that has been promoted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and widely accepted as a vehicle to achieve the United Nations SDGs.

Mutual benefit

Successful and sustainable public-private engagement builds on contributions from both the public and the private sector, with each sector contributing to the success of the other. While the public sector is more likely to invest in long-term programmes and the underpinning core infrastructures needed for sustained high-quality weather and climate monitoring, the private sector can be more responsive to targeted investments to bridge data gaps and to meet special customers’ needs. The private sector is also faster at applying innovation and emerging technologies. The public sector’s deep understanding of societal needs and trusted connection with governing authorities are critical in assuring community safety through responsiveness to authoritative warnings. At the same time, the technological agility of the private sector may present opportunities to meet novel and emerging service needs.

Guiding principles for public-private engagement

A set of principles to guide successful public-private engagement described in the Guidelines for Public-private Engagement includes:

• Advancing the overarching goals articulated in the WMO Convention

• Shared value

• Sustainability

• Advancing together

• Level playing field

• Integrity

• Sovereignty

• Transparency

See the Guidelines for Public-private Engagement in WMO official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

The mission of WMO, as stated under Article 2 of the WMO Convention, is to facilitate worldwide cooperation in monitoring and predicting changes in weather, climate, water and other environmental conditions through the exchange of information and services, standardization, application, research and training. To this end, the WMO PPE promotes cooperation between the stakeholders from the public, private and academic sectors, and the civil society, in advancing the weather and climate intelligence at all levels in addressing the rapidly growing and changing demand of the society.

The PPE, through international multi-sectoral dialogues, establishes a process to identify converging approaches to address major challenges of global weather, climate and water enterprise. It reflects the interest of all WMO Programmes to exploite partnership and innovation across all sectors in order to boost the availability of high-quality information and services. The PPE fosters and maintains transparent, trusting and sustainable collaboration of all stakeholders, and in doing so, supports the major WMO role in promoting free and unrestricted international sharing of data and products that makes possible the operation of all stakeholders. In addition, PPE focuses on the WMO role of promulgating international standards to ensure quality, interoperability, efficiency and provision of fit-for-purpose services across the enterprise.

A major task for the PPE is to contribute to the efforts for reducing the capacity gap between the developed and developing countries through improved modes of targeted assistance in cooperation with the development agencies. This involves improved understanding of cross-sectoral collaboration, structured national and regional dialogue to build trust and to promote good practices of public-private-academic collaboration under the diverse legislative and institutional frameworks.

The priorities of the WMO PPE for the period of 2020-2023 are:

• Fostering stakeholders dialogue and advance common priorities of weather, climate and water enterprise (multilateral and bilateral);

• Analytical studies and positions for "key challenges"; identifying and promoting good practices; 

• Raising awareness of Members and other stakeholders for Public-Private-Academic Engagement and associated policies;

• Facilitating regional and national dialogue and initiatives (pilots) to build a collaborative culture of public-private-academic engagement;

• Contribution to the data policy dialogue and related events (e.g., the WMO Data Conference in Nov 2020);

• Working with industry partners, such as HMEI, to build better understanding of specific PPE challenges;

• Enhancing competency of WMO programmes and activities through the public-private-academic engagement.