Nils Hempelmann
Mr. Hempelmann holds a PhD in Geography and provides a combination of an extensive scientific background in climate change data assessment and sustainable development as well as software engineering for scientific data processing and information delivery. Furthermore, he gained deep insights of the United Nations policy mechanisms e.g. as a member of the German UNCCD delegation as well as a UNFCCC observer. He contributes to OGC with his almost 20 years of research, scientific software development, and climate service consultation experiences from international project contributions in research environments as well as consultation of international cooperation organisations.
Sessions
A number of policy initiatives over the last three decades have been striving to limit the impacts of global warming, reverse land degradation, stop the loss of biodiversity, protect finite natural resources, and reduce the risks associated with environmental disasters. They are summarized under the umbrella
of the United Nations Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which together aim at building the resilience of people and systems to new environmental and socioeconomic conditions in the future.
Beyond political will, achieving these objectives and tracking progress requires science, data and technology: sophisticated observation instruments and networks, coordinated modeling experiments, scientific assessments, global data access infrastructures and analytical capacity to process
and translate data into relevant information. While some of these endeavors have benefited from international coordination and funding under the umbrella of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and other framework agreements, many still rely on uncoordinated national or international projects, resulting in a proliferation of incompatible, short-lived initiatives. Beyond the waste of time and energy, our main concern is that many solo technological initiatives all solve the same simple problems, deferring work on more complex issues.
Advances on the hard global problems of our time requires greater collaboration and innovation. We argue that policy instruments should include technological guidelines, for example mandate the use of international standards for analysis ready data formats, metadata, geodatacubes or machine to machine communication protocols, in order to foster interoperability and software reuse. This would strengthen
international collaboration on innovative development, and in turn contribute to the deployment of effective, robust and scientifically credible products to support decision-making and
local climate action.