The Belmont Forum, a coalition of national science agencies from 13 countries, is supporting an 18-month effort to implement a Knowledge Hub community-building and strategy development program as a first step to coordinate and streamline international efforts on community governance, interoperability and system architectures. This initiative represents a first step to build an international capacity and e-infrastructure framework collaboratively to address societally relevant global environmental change challenges. The project will deliver a community-owned strategy and implementation plan, which will prioritize international funding opportunities for Belmont Forum members to build pilots and exemplars in order to accelerate delivery of end-to end global change decision support systems.

Pooling Belmont Forum members¹ resources to bring communities together for further integration, cooperation, and leveraging of existing initiatives and resources has the potential to develop the e-infrastructure framework necessary to solve pressing environmental problems. The plan is expected to serve as the foundation of a future Belmont Forum call for proposals for e-Infrastructures and Data Management.

The Town Hall meeting will allow the Earth Science community to hear the latest news of development of the planning phase, and to make suggestions for the further development of the work.