Our global societies are facing many complex and interlinked challenges such as climate change, sea-level rise, water and food security, uncontrolled spread of infectious diseases or finding tools for sustainable development of our dwindling mineral and petroleum resources. Environmental and Earth system sciences have a significant role to play in these challenges but will require the integration of scientific data, software and tools from multiple, globally distributed resources to unlock their potential to contribute. The preconditions for interdisciplinary research are set by existing national- and continental-scale research infrastructures and e-infrastructures (e.g., EOSC, ENVRI, EPOS, EarthCube, IRIS, UNAVCO, AuScope, etc.). We now need to foster their convergence and develop innovative and FAIR data and software, as well as integrated services to enhance the efficiency and productivity of researchers as we scale up to more complex challenges upcoming. Thereby, some problems will require new solutions such as next-generation computing at exascale.
This session solicits papers from different fields of expertise in the Environmental and Earth system domain (research and e-infrastructures, repositories and data hubs, interdisciplinary data users, global initiatives etc.), who are working to support tackling the existing and upcoming challenges. We also invite papers from those who are working towards the next generation infrastructures who can point up the practical challenges, perspectives, and potential solutions related to creating an open and collaborative ecosystem of research and e-Infrastructures that will support the next phase of Environmental and Earth system science research at exascale.