Setting the course ahead: key insights from the iClimateAction Webinar series
The series aimed to give participants shared and realistic examples of how climate data and knowledge are currently organised, accessed and used. As iCA’s Coordinator, Paolo Laj noted in the first session, the sessions were meant to give participants “the right idea of the landscape”, allowing discussions in Harwell to move quickly beyond introductions and focus instead on gaps, priorities and concrete next steps.
SAGE Data Space: trusted sharing without centralising data
The first webinar introduced the SAGE Data Space project, presented by Mark Dietrich, its technical coordinator. SAGE is a European initiative designed to make it easier to find, access and use environmental and climate data in support of the European Green Deal.
A key point was repeatedly clarified during discussion: data spaces do not host the data. Data stays with the holders, who control visibility and access.
This is where SAGE comes in: the organisation works by linking existing data sources while allowing organisations to keep control of their data. It provides the technical and legal framework that allows this to happen in a consistent and secure way, including for data that cannot be fully open.
The webinar showed how this approach can create real value in practice. SAGE is working with a set of concrete use cases, such as forest management, pollinator monitoring and environmental risk mapping, to demonstrate how better data connections can save time, reduce duplication and support decision-making. In some cases, this includes helping organisations meet new environmental reporting requirements more efficiently.
ENVRI-Hub NEXT: harmonising access to ECV-relevant observations
The second webinar focused on the ENVRI-Hub NEXT project and the wider ENVRI community, presented by Marta Gutierrez David (EGI Foundation), with contributions from Anca Hienola (Finnish Meteorological Institute) and Ulrich Bundke (Forschungszentrum Jülich).
ENVRI brings together major European environmental research infrastructures that collect observations on the atmosphere, land, oceans and ecosystems. These observations - many of them collected directly on the ground - form a critical part of the climate data value chain.
The discussion highlighted a familiar challenge: while large amounts of high-quality data already exist, they are often difficult to find and use together. Different infrastructures use different formats, access points and terminology, making it time-consuming for scientists to compare or combine data across domains. ENVRI-Hub NEXT aims to reduce this friction by providing a common access layer that connects these infrastructures without moving their data into a single place.
When it comes to Essential Climate Variables (ECVs), the project takes a practical approach: scientists from different infrastructures work together to map their existing measurements to the ECVs defined by GCOS. This helps ensure that data from different sources can be compared and used together, even if they were collected in different ways.
Participants also stressed the importance of usability. For many users, downloading large datasets is neither practical nor necessary. Instead, they need to be able to extract just the data they need, by location, time period or variable, and use it directly in analysis tools. ENVRI-Hub NEXT is working to support this kind of targeted access, making it easier for users to work across multiple infrastructures without having to learn each system in detail.
GEO Knowledge Hub: shifting from open data to reusable open knowledge
The third webinar focused on the GEO Knowledge Hub and was presented by Paola De Salvo, the Hub’s Coordinator. The session introduced the Hub as a practical response to a recurring problem: while large amounts of Earth observation data are available, the knowledge needed to turn that data into usable solutions is often scattered, hard to reproduce, or lost when projects end.
The GEO Knowledge Hub addresses this by focusing on open knowledge, not only open data. Instead of acting as a traditional data portal, it brings together complete “knowledge packages” that show how an application or solution was built. These packages can include data sources, processing steps, code, documentation, training materials and related publications, all linked together and preserved as a single, shareable unit.
A key benefit of this approach is long-term preservation. During the discussion, the GEO team noted that they frequently receive urgent requests from projects nearing the end of their funding to “save” data or applications before websites and repositories disappear. By encouraging projects to package and share their knowledge early, the GEO Knowledge Hub tries to ensure that valuable work remains accessible and reusable beyond short funding cycles.
For more information on the project, please visit the iClimateAction website.
For more information on the GCOS-WGClimate-iClimateAction Joint Meeting (GCOS-JPM-4-iCA), please follow GCOS event.
