The EDI Committee have proposed this Union Symposium to reflect on themes arising from the screening of The Leadership documentary NET1.

In particular, we are interested in exposing and exploring the power of networks, how they are created and how networks can help researchers progress in their professional careers. This US will encourage you to reflect at a personal level on your own network, assess whether it is optimised for success, and provide clues on how you can better construct and interact in your network to optimize opportunities and garner valuable support during your often challenging career path.

Secondly, this US will provide an opportunity to raise awareness and stimulate a conversation about how we as a geoscience community augment and reinforce networks that will inspire and retain underrepresented members of the geoscience community thus bringing their voices into the 'rooms' where decisions on science and policy amongst other societal issues are currently taking place.

The biodiversity of the planet is inextricably tied to the future of humanity. Our impacts on, and ability to find solutions to, the alarmingly accelerating loss of species may not only define their survival but our own future too.

Biodiversity encompasses the variety of living organisms on Earth, including their habitats and their interactions. It supports our food system, increases community resilience, and underpins global GDP. Biodiversity is both vital for and impacted by agriculture, freshwater ecosystems, biogeosystems, soil health, climate change, natural hazards, and pollution. Despite the undeniable importance of biodiversity on environmental and societal wellbeing, ecosystems are being damaged and disappearing at an ever-faster rate.

Preserving and restoring biodiversity are incredibly complex tasks that will require both scientific expertise and intersectoral collaboration. This Union Symposium will highlight some of the key biodiversity challenges that humanity is currently facing and how they can potentially be overcome. It will also outline some of the recent European biodiversity targets and legislation, what’s coming next, how geoscience is being used to find solutions, and where more research is needed.

The Symposia panel will include geoscientists working in areas related to the biodiversity and policymakers who are currently working on European biodiversity initiatives and who are concerned by integrative pathways to be explored with water, climate, soil, oceans, natural hazards, biogeosystems, and Earth observations. The session will include presentations from these speakers as well as a moderated discussion on how geoscientists can best support the Europe’s biodiversity targets and a Q&A with the audience. While this session will have a European focus, it will also emphasise the importance of biodiversity as a global issue.

The format of scientific conferences has come under significant scrutiny and has been the subject of extensive debate in recent years; these debates centered on the carbon footprint and sustainability of such conferences, but also on questions of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion as well as accessibility at these conferences. Within the geosciences, the debate has been particularly strong given that global change and sustainability are part of our direct research subjects and the community has realized the amount of work still needed to attain the goal of truly inclusive and diverse meeting participation and a fair and equal exposure at such conferences.

The Covid-19 pandemic has strongly expedited the evolution of scientific conferences, as numerous learned societies were forced to organize virtual meetings. EGU has thus needed to very rapidly change the format of the 2020 General Assembly from a traditional in-person meeting to “Sharing Geoscience online”, and organize vEGU21 as a fully virtual meeting, while EGU22 is the first hybrid meeting in the history of the Union.

It is now a good time to take stock and look forward: what have we learned from our experiences with virtual and hybrid meetings; how can we take these experiences to design more sustainable global meetings in future; how can we make such hybrid meetings more accessible and inclusive while fostering diversity of presenters and ideas? This Union Symposium will bring together meeting organizers and members of the community who have presented thoughts about future meetings to reflect on the required and desired evolution of scientific conferences, with a focus on the geosciences.

“Neo-colonial science” or “parachute science” is a practice where international scientists, usually from higher-income countries, conduct fieldwork or collect data and samples in another country, usually of lower income, and then elaborate the data and publish scientific results without involving native researchers and/or communities.
This Union Symposium will provide participants with an introduction to the neo-colonial science, highlighting pertinent examples on how this practice has created a dependency on expertise with consequent lack of knowledge building and infrastructures development in countries that have been the base of important discoveries. Neo-colonial science is particularly evident across many geosciences’ disciplines, where low income countries have been used as natural laboratories for fieldwork of world-class researchers.

Scientific neocolonialism is unfair to the local scientific communities, who may contribute to the work without being recognized nor treated as equal partners. In addition, the scientific interpretations resulting from such approaches may suffer from the lack of local knowledge – which could prevent wrong hypothesis or extrapolations.

The presentations and discussions of this Union Symposium aim to shed light on various examples of scientific neo-colonialism, how EGU members can have significant impact, and how inclusion in global research can lead to better science.

Over the past few years, criticism on the singularly focused metrics evaluation of scientists has grown, making it clear that a cultural shift is needed to modernise our assessment system. Many universities and funding agencies worldwide have already signed the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA), thereby committing to a broader and more overarching assessment of researchers and their research proposals.

For the last several decades, quantitative indices such as the number of publications, the h-index or the journal impact factor have served as near-singular measures of scientific success. Other key areas, such as education, leadership, and institutional and societal engagement have been undervalued. While being a good educator, having strong leadership skills and serving the scientific community are appreciated, these parameters have become a requirement in addition to an impressive publication record. This means scientists need to excel in all academic activities (research, teaching, service) in order to be considered successful, which places unrealistic expectations on individuals and significantly increases their workload.

By allowing for more diversity in academic career paths and a broader definition of what constitutes scientific excellence, there would be more options for honoring and nurturing individual talents and motivations. This could lead to a more balanced academic system that is better equipped to tackle today’s scientific challenges, including a stronger focus on team performance. Many opponents of a revised assessment system, however, fear that moving away from quantitative measures will make it more difficult to objectively assess and compare academics, leading to a loss of quality. Qualitative characterizations are more difficult to compare and rely on the make-up of the evaluating team, but that is not reason to dismiss them as part of the evaluation process.

In this great debate, we query: (1) Is there a mechanism to integrate qualitative assessment with quantitative metrics when evaluating academics, (2) how could a revised assessment system be organised and implemented universally, as adoption by all is needed for it to be effective, and (3) how will broader assessment criteria strengthen scientific leadership in the future?

Invited panelists:
Olivier Pourret, Caroline Slomp, Fabio Crameri and Catherine McCammon

The IPCC’s sixth assessment report could not be clearer that climate change is both extreme and accelerating, that human activity is unequivocally to blame, that the impacts will be severe, and that we must act swiftly and dramatically, both collectively and as individuals.
As earth scientists, our community will have a vital role to play in assessing impacts, informing actions and helping to shape both public understanding, and political action.
This Great Debate examines the role of the earth science community at this pivotal moment for human society and the overall health of our planet.
An invited panel representing a broad cross-section of scientists, policy-makers and influencers will address the following questions:
• What is the role for earth scientists in solving the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced?
• Do we have the skills, the agility and the resources we need?
• Are we creating the science and information we need, and are we doing it fast enough?
• Are our academic and research institutions fit for purpose, and focused on the right challenges?
• Do we have the necessary communications skills and channels, and the confidence to deliver sometimes difficult messaging with clarity and impact?
• Can we strengthen evidential links between continued harmful activities and impacts, and will we be ready to demonstrate the benefits of positive actions?
• Can our messaging help tip societal values and behaviour towards positive action?
To quote UN Secretary General António Guterres, ‘The alarm bells are deafening (and) there is no time for delay and no room for excuses.’

Open Science represents research that is collaborative, transparent, and accessible. This includes providing open access to all scientific outputs, such as publications, data, methods, software, and more. Open Science practices are intended to improve transparency, reproducibility, and dissemination of new knowledge. By enabling greater usability of data and methods, it has the potential to improve the productivity of the research community.

Despite best intentions by the scientific community, several barriers often prevent making data, software, and publications fully open and accessible to all. For example, sharing of data may be constrained by confidentiality issues or protective data policies by private and public organisations. Furthermore, storing and sharing large datasets comes with technical challenges and costs that may be difficult to face for individuals and organisations. Similarly, sharing methods and software in a format accessible to others may require additional effort, for instance the application of software engineering best practices, that researchers may be reluctant to undertake due to lack of adequate reward, incentives, or recognition. The drive towards Open Science may also be met with reticence or resistance by individuals or organisations that are currently well-served by the status quo.

In this Great Debate we invite our panel members and the audience from all geosciences to reflect on the following questions:

* How can universities, funding bodies, and publishers promote Open Science?
* What more can structural initiatives such as Plan S or DORA do to support Open Science?
* What are some successful examples and barriers yet to be overcome?
* How can researchers and administration help remove those barriers?
* Are individual researchers primarily responsible for advancing Open Science, or should institutions, publishers and funding agencies take main responsibility?
* How can we align the goals of individual researchers (i.e. careers/publishing) and the scientific community (i.e. gaining knowledge but also avoiding duplication of efforts)?
* What are the priorities to bring Open Science into practice (e.g. open access to articles, data, code, workflows)?
* How does commitment to Open Science impact science-industry collaborations and translation of science into practice?
* What are pitfalls in Open Science? Are there disadvantages?

More information about our panel members and ways to engage before and after the General Assembly can be found here:
https://great-debate-open-science.github.io/EGU2022/

Data is at the backbone of our research discussions, conclusions and solutions to problems nature presents us with. Did the apple fall to the ground, once or twice? It always does.

In today’s age with use of the most advanced laboratory capability the (geo)science community produces data at an ever increasing level of precision, resolution and volume. E.g. 1000 geochronology dates a day using laser ablation ICP mass spectrometry systems at a 30 µm resolution with <5% precision, that is <1Gb. Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors generate about one petabyte of collision data per second (~1Mb per collision). Most of this analytical data is highly variable and lacking standardised community-agreed metadata.

The greatest challenge pertaining to laboratory analytical research is to collate, store and make these data publicly available in standardised and machine-accessible form. But do we have to? Do we want to?

This great debate puts the questions, problems, challenges and opportunities around geoanalytical research data to the center stage at EGU, a topic researchers from almost every scientific division are concerned with. Short opening statements, from a panel representing the Earth, Environmental, Planetary and Space sciences, are followed with a discussion on how to improve the situation for EGU members who work with and on laboratory analytical data.

Discussions can be around:
Community development of systems to facilitate easy and efficient research data management, and need for more user buy-in.
The push from publishers and journals who increasingly require access to the supporting data from a trusted repository prior to publication of manuscripts.
When should data, initially collected in a researcher’s private domain, become public?
The need for and lack of global standards, best practices and protocols for analytical data management and exchange in order for scientists to better share their data in a global network of distributed databases.
When to capture analytical data, raw (lab), reduced (private/collaborative), polished (publicised).

To ensure long-term impact of these data, they need to be efficiently managed and losslessly transferred from laboratory instruments in “Private” domains to a “Collaboration” domain, to the “Public” domain, complete with all relevant information about the analytical process and uncertainty, and cross-references to originating samples and publications.

The journey of water on planet Earth is long and timeless. The study of the water cycle, hydrology, is a broad field of geosciences as water travels from the atmosphere to the deep soil and from rivers to oceans. Hydrology includes a diverse range of observations, theories, models and predictions for the coupled human-natural systems. Fundamental & applied research in hydrology has direct implications for the monitoring, modelling & management of water in glaciers, lakes, reservoirs, ponds, rivers, streams, wetlands, and aquifers. Central to the climate-environment-society interactions, hydrology offers invaluable knowledge & tools for informing policy-relevant decisions as well as driving sustainable climate resilience & disaster preparedness for compound & multiple hazards.
Despite being traditionally rooted in engineering, research progress in hydrology has lately benefited from the perspective shift towards Earth System (ES) Science. The IAHS Unsolved Problems in Hydrology (UPH) highlights the need for improved research collaboration across diverse systems, scales & processes of geosciences. The efforts of the World Meteorological Organization in developing a research strategy for hydrology is rooted in bringing hydrology forward in the implementation of weather & climate research programs for seamless ES prediction. However, translation of research into delivery of national hydrological & meteorological services remains low and ineffective. This is ever more needed as the Earth’s disturbed hydrological cycle manifests more frequent & intense weather-water-climate extremes with far reaching consequences for the safety of citizens & economies.
In this Great Debate, we bring the following questions forward to catalyze the future evolution of hydrology in support of integrated (geo)science-practice-policy-education development: * What are geoscientists missing about the water cycle? * What is the role of hydrology in modelling the dynamic interactions & feedbacks of the different ES components? * Are we doing enough to represent coupled social–economic–natural complex ecosystems hydrologically right in ES models? * Do we need higher resolution/more accurate hydrological models or better linkages to society/policy? * How can improved (hydrological) process knowledge make its way to hydromet services & water policy? * Can hydrology provide ESS the critical leverage to foster impact-based services, citizen engagement & environmental policy agendas?

A lack of permanent positions and predominantly temporary contracts in academia is challenging for early and mid-career scientists. Recent estimates in Germany suggest that 78% of scientists are on fixed-term contracts (German Trade Union Confederation, 2020). Their life is heavily impacted by job options which in turn also influences their future career choices. Often, the initial idea behind fixed-term contracts was to enhance scientific exchange, collaborations, and innovation. However, many scientists experience the disadvantages associated with them, such as regularly moving city/country, uprooting families, and regular pressure to find a new job. Many scientists attribute short-term contracts to their desire to move away from academic careers. The distribution of fixed-term and permanent contracts is not equal across gender, ethnicity, or age. Whilst recent studies in the U.K. found 28% of white male scientists were employed on a fixed-term basis, this number was 45% for Asian female scientists (Higher Education Statistics Agency, U.K., 2019). Would science benefit from more permanent contracts? Or do short-term contracts provide opportunities to work with a range of groups and institutes?

Recently, there has been a surge in the discussion on fixed-term contracts and the academic careers system in general. In this panel discussion (if the GA is online) or round-table discussion (if the GA is in-person), invited speakers will share their opinions and provide suggestions on how to move forward or revise the career system. This debate will give the opportunity to discuss a timely and controversial topic that is relevant for all career stages.