A Global Capacity Building Vision for Societal Applications of Earth Observing Systems and Data: Key Questions and Recommendations

A three-day workshop held on 23-25 June 2015 at Tacoma was convened to debate issues and formulate a vision and path forward to strengthen the voice of the global societal applications and capacity building community. There were 27 in-person attendees at the workshop, including experts from the applied sciences community already engaged in EO-based capacity building across various themes for the stakeholder community and from the satellite EO data community. International participants provided perspectives on capacity building relevant to their region. For South Asia, the key issue noted in building durable applications was recognizing indigenous knowledge and explicitly using it in the design of decision-making systems that uptake Earth observations. In Southeast Asia, participants noted that solutions built for disaster risk reduction using EO will have to be compatible with country-specific skills and human resource settings that represent wide variability in the region.