International Call for SCO Projects 2021: Submit now !

Stakes

Our planet’s climate is undergoing big changes that are influencing temperatures, precipitation, winds and many other geophysical and geomorphological parameters, and the consequences of these changes are affecting all of humanity. While these phenomena have been studied for several decades by scientists, global awareness of them is recent, and the need for preparedness, mitigation and adaptation at local level is urgent. Nevertheless, we still lack tools for local decision-makers incorporating the most recent developments in data and algorithms.

Solutions

In the current phase, the main mode of SCO to address the above challenge is to provide high visibility and general support to projects led by consortia federating the scientific community, public authorities and private sector firms, which propose operational tools to local decision-makers to inform their climate change policies.
This visibility is provided by exposure on the SCO website, after recognition – which has been defined as a “SCO labeling” - that the projects meet the SCO objectives and guidelines and benefits from international cooperation and collaboration.
Under an international umbrella, the SCO is organized at the national level. For instance, SCO France is supporting the emergence of new projects and labelling them within the guidelines set out by SCO International. It is offering its expertise and network to propose operational tools for authorities and end-users. In 2020, 15 projects have been labelled for agriculture, remote-sensing epidemiology, urban climate, coastline dynamics, mangroves, floods and more.

Ambition

SCO is a unique observatory underpinned by a network of scientific and technical agencies. Although SCO is not a financing agency, its extended network allows it to help labelled projects to raise money from various climate change programmes as well as to scale it up and transfer it to other stakeholders.
Pilot SCO projects are focused on specific geographic areas, bringing together local stakeholders and decision-makers across the globe, and fostering use of global spatial and meteorological data at local scales. The SCO aims to become a major player on the world climate related applications, supporting decision making at local level.
In the next phase, due to start in about one year from now, the SCO ambition is therefore to generate projects, data, algorithms and local indicators to make all of this available to vulnerable areas through an international charter that can be activated on request.

2021 Call for projects

SCO International will be opening a new campaign of labelling projects in September 2020. You are encouraged to download the form hereafter and submit a proposal.

• The deadline for submitting a proposal is 30 November, 2020
• The decisions on labelling will be published by 1 February 2021

Projects review and Labeling

A “Labeling Committee”, composed by representatives of the SCO Partners, will review the submitted proposal. For the review, the Committee will assess the suitability of the proposal to become a SCO project, against the following guidelines:

1. Select case studies that specifically address the needs of users within a geographic area
2.  Propose an operational and practical software
3. Make the best use of available satellite, environmental, climate, in situ and socio-economic data, at a resolution adapted to the problem
4. Build on (pre-)operational and research infrastructures, services and local data provision
5. Have a built-in potential for extension/upgrade of tools in several geographic areas (”scalability” and “transportability”)

Additional criteria:

• Federate a consortium of scientists, companies and public authorities able to generate new knowledge, innovative and effective core methodologies and practical tools for decision support,
• Promote a methodology based on the state of the art including the latest developments in artificial intelligence and related computing infrastructures,
• Promote the use of open-source tools and move towards an open final tool,
• Propose funding schemes for projects that involve communities in their initial phase, and define the scope of recourse to the private sector for future developments,
• Include an analysis of the associated business model,
• Consider international cooperation towards “least developing countries“ benefiting from development aid.

The Committee will then recommend to the SCO Steering Committee the Projects that are suitable for labeling. The corresponding proposers will be immediately contacted to define practical arrangements to make Labeled Projects accessible through the SCO website and to discuss ways to support them exploiting SCO network and contacts.