Geophysicists facing Covid-19

There have been a series of sessions on the generic theme of “Covid-19 and Geosciences” on the occasion of AGU, AOGS and EGU conferences, since 2020 including during the first lockdown that required a very fast adaptation to unprecedented health measures. We think it is interesting and useful to have an overview of these sessions and try to capture what could be the lessons to learn.

To our knowledge, the very first such session was the Great e-Debate “Epidemics, Urban Systems and Geosciences” (https://hmco.enpc.fr/news-and-events/great-e-debate-epidemics-urban-systems-and-geosciences-invitations-and-replays/). It was virtually organised with the help of the UNESCO UniTwin CS-DC (Complex Systems Digital Campus) thanks to its expertise in organising e-conferences long before the pandemic and the first health measures. This would not have been possible without the strong personal involvement of its chair Paul Bourgine. It was held on Monday 4th May on the occasion of the 2020 EGU conference, which became virtual under the title “EGU2020: Sharing Geoscience Online” (4-8 May 2020). The Great e-Debate did not succeed in being granted as an official session of this conference, despite the fact that the technology used (Blue Button) by the Great e-Debate was much more advanced. Nevertheless, it was clearly an extension of the EGU session ITS2.10 / NP3.3: “Urban Geoscience Complexity: Transdisciplinarity for the Urban Transition”. 

Thanks to a later venue (7-11 December 2020) and the existence of a GeoHealth section of the AGU, the organisation of several regular sessions for the 2020 Fall Meeting was easier. For EGU 2021 (19-30 April 2021), a sub-part of the  inter- transdisciplinary sessions ITS1 “Geosciences and health during the Covid pandemic”, a Union Session US “Post-Covid Geosciences” and a Townhall meeting TM10 “Covid-19 and other epidemics: engagement of the geoscience communities” were organised. A brief of the special session SS02 “Covid-19 and Geoscience” of the (virtual) 18th Annual Meeting of AOGS (1-6 August 2021) is included in the proceedings of this conference (in press). 

We will review materials generated by these sessions that rather show a shift from a focus on the broad range of scientific responses to the pandemic, to which geoscientists could contribute with their specific expertise (from data collection to theoretical modelling), to an expression of concerns about the broad impacts on the geophysical communities that appear to be increasingly long-term and constitute a major transformation of community functioning (e.g., again data collection, knowledge transfer).